BURIED WITHIN the text of the Toland Report - the blistering review of the Department of Justice's internal workings - is a thought-provoking recommendation.
"The Minister [for Justice], through the Department, needs to hold An Garda Siochána accountable as a critical and resource-intensive public service, while respecting their operational independence," it says.
The report generally makes the point that the overhaul of Garda structures in 2005 - including the creation of the Garda Inspectorate and the Garda Ombudsman - would only work if the Department placed sufficient stock, emphasis and trust in the workings of those new bodies.
Instead, it says, the Department became slowly more and more deferent to the Gardaí, perhaps as a result of another reported failing: the Department's ad hoc and disorganised way of taking command and responsibility for new issues as they arise.
The recommendation about taking a more hands-on command of the Gardaí is one that comes at a particularly prescient time.
Specifically, it comes only a few months after Fine Gael bowed to a persistent Labour demand for the state to set up a new independent Garda authority (similar to the one in the North) to depoliticise the art of policing in Ireland.
To be fair to Labour, it's a model that works quite well in the North - where politicians of all parties join independent leaders from civil society on the Northern Ireland Policing Board which holds the PSNI to account. It means the governance of policing is so crowdsourced that it's impossible for the PSNI to fall into the hands of a rogue politician or regulator.
Of course, the architecture of the PSNI was designed with one specific purpose in mind: to replace the Royal Ulster Constabulary, traditionally rejected by Catholics and Nationalists as being a stooge of hard-line Unionist rule. That's not a particular problem that An Garda Síochána runs into.
What's more, as Michael McDowell pointed out at the MacGill Summer School last week, the Gardaí have a dual role in Ireland: not only are they the national policing body, but they're also the national intelligence service - a function the PSNI does not fulfill.
Anyway, you get the point: copying and pasting the formula of policing oversight from Northern ireland into the Republic doesn't necessarily make sense in and of itself.
That's not to say the model couldn't work in the South - but if the supervision of the Gardai is to be taken from the Minister for Justice and vested in some outside agency, it must be done for the right seasons. And in that light, Michael McDowell's argument is one that the government has yet to rebuke - it might not make very much sense to farm out the running of our national intelligence service and keep it out of political hands.
There hasn't yet been a full debate on exactly who the new Independent Garda Authority will be independent of. Will it be independent of the Gardaí? Of the Oireachtas? Of the Department of Justice? Of the Minister for Justice?
While most of us will have no issue with the idea of an independent police force - and an independent authority responsible for running that independent force - many of us would equally want the Gardaí to be accountable to the public and to our politicians in some way.
We'd like to ensure that the new Garda Commissioner is still liable to be hauled before an Oireachtas committee if they're mistreating whistleblowers, or presiding over rank incompetence, or failing to deal with internal corruption and the likes. But would that be possible if the Garda Commissioner didn't answer to the Minister, who didn't answer to the Oireachtas itself?
Ultimately Ireland has yet to grapple with the difficult proposition that, fundamentally, an independent Garda authority means an undemocratic Garda authority which doesn't answer to the people we elect to run the country. And once we've gotten our heads around that idea, we need to decide if that's something we'd prefer.
At MacGill, Michael McDowell said if it came to a decision between having the national police service answering to a democratically appointed Minister for Justice, or to an outside quango with no direct political answerability, he knows which option he'd pursue. It's a question that Frances Fitzgerald admitted she needed to consider.
She could do worse than listen to the advice of someone who knows a thing or two in this area: her own predecessor, Alan Shatter, who was so ideologically opposed to a new Garda Authority that he only agreed to do so after a cabinet sub-committee was set up to supervise him.
In 2012, responding to a written Dáil question, he said:
"The Garda Síochána Act 2005 makes clear that the Garda Commissioner is accountable to my Department and to me as Minister for the performance of his functions and those of the Force, and of course I am politically answerable in the House in respect of these matters. The 2005 Act also made the Commissioner the Accounting Officer for the Garda Síochána, and liable to appear before the Committee of Public Accounts in that capacity.
In addition, the 2005 Act established the Garda Ombudsman Commission, which is empowered to carry out independent investigations into Garda conduct, as well as the Garda Inspectorate, which provides expert advice on achieving the highest levels of efficiency and effectiveness in the operation and administration of the Force. The accountability of the Garda Síochána has, through these measures, been significantly strengthened.
I might also make the point that any comparison with accountability arrangements in other jurisdictions, should take into account the fact that the Garda Síochána is rare among police forces in combining security and intelligence functions with policing duties, and should look at the totality of arrangements in those jurisdictions."
This brings me back to my original point. Shatter's points about the 2005 Act are slightly undermined by the Department's failings, as identified in the Toland report: the Department simply didn't put enough stock in GSOC or the Garda Inspectorate and ultimately left the Gardaí on an unquestioned, psychological pedestal.
But forever delegating control of national policing and security to an unelected body could do to policing what the HSE did to healthcare: put it in a domain where the system can become some complex and convoluted that it effectively spins beyond the Government's control at all.
The Minister says she's accepting and implementing all of the recommendations of the Toland Report. That also means accepting the plain and honest opinion of the expert group: there's little wrong with the Garda Inspectorate or Garda Ombudsman, and it's actually the Department itself that's at fault.
Alan Shatter, Michael McDowell and the expert group are all on one side on this: if the Department of Justice was doing its job properly, the Gardaí would already be accountable - and democratically so.
If it's going to pursue this campaign to the bitter end, Labour need to be absolutely sure that it's doing so because it wants Gardaí taken away from all politicians forever, and not just from a minister who's already been shoved out the door.
Gavan Reilly is Today FM's political correspondent. twitter.com/gavreilly
