I retired from An Garda Síochána back in May, 2015, after serving for more than 35 years. That’s ten years ago this month.

Policing in Ireland has changed a lot since my day and it’s a different organisation to the one I was part of.

I don’t know too many of the gardaí currently serving and I’m pretty sure not many of them remember me. We’ve all moved on.

So, as they say, I have no skin in the game at this stage, and it shouldn’t really bother me who runs the show, but it does.

The search for the new Garda Commissioner has nothing to do with me personally, but I’m going to make some observations anyway because, at the end of the day, the outcome will affect everyone as members of the community.

Let me say at the outset that I was never in favour of the outgoing Commissioner Drew Harris getting the top job. I’ve never met him, and I know very little about him, but the thought of a policeman from another jurisdiction taking over that position never sat right with me.

We have a unique system of policing in this country, and since its foundation, it has been based around the community.

The community was always the heart and soul of everything we did, and I doubted at the time whether an outsider would ever understand that. Especially someone coming from the PSNI, which has a completely different policing history.

I was fortunate enough to have travelled as part of my work. I dealt with many foreign police forces in those days, and it never ceased to amaze me how well regarded we were as an unarmed........

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