Drew Harris Cannot Continue As Garda Commissioner
Éirígí For A New Republic spokesperson Breandán Mac Cionnaith had called for Drew Harris to be removed from his role as Garda Commissioner. He made the call in the aftermath of ongoing politically-motivated interventions by the former Deputy Chief Constable of the PSNI. Speaking from Portadown, Co Armagh, Mac Cionnaith said,
“The widespread criticism that followed the appointment of Drew Harris as Garda Commissioner in 2018 has now been fully vindicated. Over the course of the last week he has made repeated public statements which were clearly designed to influence the formation of a new government in the Twenty-Six Counties.
His recent claims about Sinn Féin and the IRA were regurgitated from a five-year-old ‘Assessment of Paramilitary Activity’ report. The document was jointly produced by the PSNI and MI5 at a time when Harris was directly responsible for ‘high risk policing operations’ by the PSNI and working extremely closely with MI5.
Harris is now using his position of Garda Commissioner to retrospectively endorse the findings of a report that was produced by a British police force and a British spy agency - a report which he himself almost certainly had input into.
Drew Harris as Garda Commissioner with his former boss, George Hamilton, the Chief Constable of the PSNI.
None of this has surprised anyone who knows the Drew Harris back story. During his time in the RUC and PSNI Harris was up to his neck in Britain’s dirty war and the cover-up of that war. In his final years in the PSNI he was directly responsible for undermining, frustrating and blocking human rights investigations into RUC shoot-to-kill incidents and collusion between the British state and unionist death squads.
In this part of the country those death squads murdered scores of innocent people over several decades. The most notorious of those death squads, the Glennane Gang, murdered dozens of people south of the border in Dublin and Monaghan, in the largest mass murder in the history of the state where Harris now controls policing.
Someone with that sort of background like that should never have been put in charge of the Gardaí. The events of the last week have further proven his absolute unsuitability for the role. Drew Harris should be removed from the role without further delay.“