Garda response time is a widespread bugbear with the public. Urgent calls to the cops are frequently greeted by frontline officers with what appears to be considerably less than urgency. However, garda response time assumes an even more glacial pace when it comes to investigations of “internal affairs”.

Even when the top brass appears genuinely determined to crack down on corruption, their would-be reforms move without pulse, direction or alacrity. After decades of public demands for a whistleblowers’ mechanism within the force, a new confidential system for reporting garda malpractice was announced in April 2007. Yet, for reasons nobody can explain, the system wasn’t activated until four months ago. Already, it has received three contacts from gardai concerned about the conduct of fellow officers. By garda standards, this amounts to a torrential flood.

The so-called “whistleblowers’ charter” was established on the recommendation of the tribunal of inquiry into the behaviour of certain Donegal gardai by Justice Frederick Morris, which published the last two of its eight reports last week. Following 685 days of hearings, and at a cost of more than ¤60m, the tribunal has exposed damning evidence of systematic garda corruption involving perjury, fit-ups, harassment, hoax explosive finds and extensive cover-ups.

Remarkably, however, much of the coverage about the tribunal’s latest reports centred on Morris’s criticism of Brendan Howlin and Jim Higgins, the opposition politicians who in 2000 alerted then justice minister John O’Donoghue to allegations that named senior officers were involved in fabricating evidence.

The allegations turned out to be false and appear to have been concocted to intensify political demands for a public inquiry into garda shenanigans in Donegal. Morris admonished the politicians for not investigating the claims more thoroughly. He also found that, by precipitately contacting O’Donoghue, they afforded the allegations “a standing and authority well beyond what was justified”.

Morris has proven himself to be a formidable inquisitor, and the conclusions in his reports are admirably forthright. Nevertheless, his censure of Howlin and Higgins is perverse. Were it not for their decision to act on the information they’d received, the Morris tribunal itself would probably never have been set up.

In reality, Howlin and Higgins acted responsibly and in the public interest. Rather than airing the allegations in the Dail, they privately brought the material in their possession to the relevant minister. It is unreasonable to expect that they themselves could have carried out any meaningful investigation into what were allegations of serious criminal behaviour.

Morris’s central charge against Howlin and Higgins is one of naivety. “Politicians,” he wrote, “must be attuned to the possibility that they may be used to advance a wholly false agenda.”

This is undoubtedly the case. Few of those who go public with damaging information do so for noble reasons. Yet the motivation of whistleblowers is almost incidental. What matters is whether the information they provide stacks up or leads to further discoveries.

It is those who blithely dismissed claims that the cops in Donegal were out of control who displayed true naivety.

The allegations passed on to Howlin and Higgins did not emerge from a vacuum. They were made in the context of consistent and credible concerns about garda conduct in the area.

As Morris himself has repeatedly established, protagonists on all sides of this sprawling saga have been spinning furiously for years and little most of them says can be taken at face value. Only by investigating all of the allegations, however, have the authorities been able to piece together something approaching the truth. Howlin and Higgins are to be commended for both their response and their response time.

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