Ms Fiona Crowley:

It might seem that it was a little cosmetic at the time, but the Garda Síochána Act referred to the police service as a service deliberately rather than to refer to it as a police force. This was intended to follow the Patten model for the Police Service of Northern Ireland. It was intended to get over the idea that policing is simply about control, coercive policing and crime prevention, detection and investigation. That is what Amnesty encounters throughout the world. It is trying to overcome the idea that policing only matters if you are locking people up. It is about helping the community, maintaining order and maintaining security for everyone. It is a pity that some of that appears to have got lost. Therefore, it is about looking again at the internal processes within the Garda to see if it recognises that service delivery is a critical part of modern policing.