It is not clear why Mr R, a law-abiding citizen, was so wary of the men in Crossan’s public house in Bailieboro, Co Cavan, on the night of May 23rd, 2007. But he had reason to fear them: he told the O’Higgins commission that they were “not the type of boys to be messed with”. A garda told him later that the gardaí­, too, knew “these boys” and that “everybody is afraid to take these lads on”.

And on that night, these thugs attacked Mr R in Crossan’s bar. One of them got him down on the ground and gave him “five to six boxes into his face”. He was bloodied and concussed and robbed of his personal dignity. His humiliation and anguish were deepened when he was told that, two nights later, the culprits enjoyed themselves watching the CCTV footage of the assault in public in the bar.

Victims

Mr R’s wife told the judge: “[My husband] and I, you know, were raised in Bailieboro. It’s a small town, so if you have trouble or you’re concerned or anything, your first stop is the Garda station. They are who you trust, they’re who you go to, and that’s what we did, we went to them.” As the judge puts it laconically “their trust was not justified”.

For these citizens, the State was embodied in the person of Garda Sean Daly. He was, as Mrs R told the judge, “very polite” and “a lovely guard”. He was also a probationer whose period of probation had been extended beyond the norm, presumably because his superiors knew that he was not competent to function without close supervision. He didn’t take statements from important witnesses to the assault on Mr R for many months. When he did so, some of those statements were neither signed not dated.

Agitated

Daly’s behaviour was outrageous. He effectively aborted the prosecution of a violent assault simply to cover up his own incompetence – as the O’Higgins report puts it, “Garda Daly obtained the statement of withdrawal to cover his own significant failure to carry out an adequate investigation into the assault”. But this was not the worst of it. When Sgt Maurice McCabe included this case in his formal complaints about poor standards of policing in Cavan, his superiors showed a deep reluctance to say that McCabe’s complaint was justified.

Assistant commissioner Derek Byrne and chief superintendent Terri McGinn conducted the internal investigation into McCabe’s complaints. In this case, they failed to focus on the key question: the withdrawal of Mr R’s complaint. They presented what O’Higgins calls a “formulaic summary” of the failures in the investigation. But drafts of their final report did not even mention the crucial withdrawal of the complaint until a note by chief superintendent McGinn appeared in a “comment box”: “Are we going to mention statement of withdrawl [sic], timing of same and manner in which it was taken to cover ourselves?” This was not, as the judge emphasises, a reference to a cover-up, but it does show that the central issue was an afterthought.

Perhaps even more extraordinarily, their report claimed an inspector had cleared Daly of any breach of discipline – when this had simply not happened. Staggeringly, chief superintendent McGinn “was of the view that it might be unfair to Garda Daly to uphold the complaint”. And in fact no action was taken against Daly. There were no consequences for deliberately derailing the prosecution of a violent assault.

I’ve picked the case of Mr R from the O’Higgins report not because it is the most serious but because, on the contrary, it is the simplest. It was dreadful, feckless police work by a young guard and a betrayal of the ethic of public service. But it did not threaten a huge scandal. In a normal democracy, it could have been handled quite straightforwardly: sack the guard; abjectly apologise to Mr R; find out what went wrong in the chain of command and fix it.

Accountability