Police Cooperation across the Irish Border: Familiarity Breeding Contempt for Transparency and Accountability

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2011.00544.x
Published date01 June 2011
Date01 June 2011
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 38, NUMBER 2, JUNE 2011
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 301±30
Police Cooperation across the Irish Border:
Familiarity Breeding Contempt for Transparency and
Accountability
Dermot P.J. Walsh*
This article critically examines the practice, methods, and regulation of
cross-border police cooperation between the Republic of Ireland and
Northern Ireland. Despite legal and political divisions, police
cooperation has survived and flourished in recent years especially
among police officers on the ground. By comparison, the development
of transparent regulatory and accountability structures and processes
has been disappointing. While there have been domestic initiatives at
the intergovernmental and legislative levels, these have tended to
emphasize the centrality of direct engagement between the police chiefs
and senior civil servants at the expense of formal transparent
procedures. EU instruments have been marginalized as the police
forces and their administrations prefer informal networks and force-to-
force agreements which, it is argued, shield cross-border police
cooperation from standards of transparency, oversight, and
accountability which are essential to its legitimacy. They also highlight
the limitations of the current EU legislative approach to cross-border
police cooperation.
INTRODUCTION
The completion of the single European market and the emergence of the
Treaty on European Union in the early 1990s gave a major stimulus to
research on cross-border police cooperation. Initially attention focused
largely on the challenges, processes, and implications of policing across a
301
ß2011 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2011 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing
Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
* School of Law, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
dermot.walsh@ul.ie
The research for this article was supported by the award of a Government of Ireland
Senior Research Fellowship by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social
Sciences. I am grateful for the incisive comments of anonymous reviewers on an earlier
draft.
Union which was dismantling internal legal and political borders more
rapidly than it was replacing them with its own distinct political entity and
police competence.
1
As these aspects of the Union deepened with the
Treaties of Amsterdam and Lisbon, so the locus of research moved to the
mechanics and issues surrounding the growth and operation of European
police machinery and process.
2
By contrast, bilateral police cooperation
across national boundaries, whether home-grown or in response to Union
initiatives, has attracted less attention in the English-language literature.
Two notable exceptions are the cooperation between the Kent Constabulary
in South-east England and its counterparts on the other side of the English
Channel,
3
and Rijken and Vermeulen's study of joint investigation teams.
4
Surprisingly, given the local social, economic, cultural, and geographical
environments, together with the national political context, research on the
practice and regulation of policing across the land border between the
Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland (hereafter referred to as the Irish
border) has not attracted comparable attention. This article is a contribution
to redressing that deficit.
Utilizing Benyon et al.'s three-tiered typology of macro, meso, and micro
levels of cooperation,
5
the article charts how policing across the Irish border
survived the legal and political divisions and grew, especially at the micro
level of engagement among police officers on the ground. Anderson and
302
1 See, for example, M. Anderson and M. den Boer (eds.), Policing across National
Boundaries (1994); M. Anderson et al. (eds.), Policing the European Union (1995);
B. Hebenton and T. Thomas, Policing Europe: Co-operation, Conflict and Control
(1995); J. Benyon, Police Cooperation in Europe: an Investigation (1993); M. den
Boer (ed.), Schengen, Judicial Cooperation and Policy Cooperation (1997).
2 See, for example, M. Anderson and J. Apap (eds.), Police and Justice Cooperation
and the New European Borders (2002); J. Occhipinti, The Politics of EU Police
Cooperation: toward a European FBI? (2003); M. Santiago, Europol and Police
Cooperation in Europe (2000); M. den Boer (ed.), Organised Crime: a Catalyst in
the Europeanisation of National Police and Prosecution Agencies? (2002); C.
Rijken and G. Vermeulen, Joint Investigation Teams in the European Union: from
Theory to Practice (2006).
3 For further details on cooperation between the Kent Constabulary and its counter-
parts on the other side of the channel, see F. Gallagher, `Cross-border Police
Cooperation: the Kent Experience' in New Borders for a Changing Europe: Cross-
border Cooperation and Governance, eds. J. Anderson, L. O'Dowd, and T. Wilson
(2003); J. Sheptycki, `Police Co-operation in the English Channel Region 1968±
1996' (1998) 6 European J. of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice 216.
4 See Rijken and Vermeulen, op. cit., n. 2.
5 Broadly, macro refers to agreements between the governments expressed in the
form of binding international instruments and/or legislation; meso refers to admini-
strative agreements between police forces themselves; micro refers to cooperation
between officers on the ground in individual instances or situations. See J. Benyon,
L. Turnbull, A. Willis, and R. Woodward, `Understanding Police Cooperation in
Europe: Setting a Framework for Analysis' in Anderson and den Boer, op. cit., n. 1,
ch. 3.
ß2011 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2011 Cardiff University Law School

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