One of the major advantages emerging from the forthcoming legislation to reconfigure the Garda Síochána and its management process and establish an inspectorate is the exciting prospect that it will bring direct responsibility and proactive policing into our community. This is what the Patten report planned for Northern Ireland and it is what we have to do here. Many of the Garda Síochána's procedures and structures have hardly changed a jot since the post-Civil War society of the 1920s in which it was founded three quarters of a century ago – a bicycle lamp culture very different from the society in which we live today.