If you check out Drew Harris on Wikipedia, you’ll learn that his father was a senior RUC officer who was killed by the IRA in 1989, that Drew himself joined the RUC in 1983, and that he gained a Masters degree in criminology from Cambridge. You will find no mention of the fact that in 2010, Drew wrote to the solicitors of people whose loved ones had been killed by the UVF, telling them there’d be no investigation into the activities of the Glenanne gang. This was surprising as well as disappointing, since the UK government had promised the Council of Europe that signs of UK state killings would be investigated to establish if state violation of the right to life had occurred. The Glenanne gang is generally believed to have killed nearly one hundred people and to have worked with state forces. It also doesn’t mention that in 2010 Drew took over control of the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) and removed investigative powers from them. Mr Justice Treacey accused Drew of an extreme abuse of power.
Drew has been in the headlines at least twice since then. The first was when he left his role of Deputy Chief Constable of the PSNI and took the highly-paid job of Garda Commissioner in Dublin. The second was an incident that occurred last month, when Drew was returning from the north in an unmarked PSNI vehicle and the vehicle crashed outside Garda headquarters at the Phoenix Park. This happened, it’s believed, when a garda officer didn’t recognize the unmarked PSNI vehicle and activated a spring-bollard system, which caused the PSNI vehicle to crash.
The bigger question here, of course, is why didn’t Drew transfer from his PSNI vehicle and into the garda vehicle waiting for him at the border? And another question: since there almost certainly were armed members of the PSNI Close Protection Unit travelling with Drew in the PSNI vehicle, there appears to have been an illegal act committed with the Garda Commissioner at the heart of it.
I rarely bet except on what I see as certainties. That’s why I’ll bet that Drew’s relationship with the PSNI, now or in the past, will not receive investigation.
They say that the Brexit mess has come about because of the arrogance of Britain in believing it could leave the EU when and how it wanted. There’s a whiff of something similar about a Garda Commissioner who ignores garda protection and chooses to travel from the border to Dublin with gun-toting former PSNI colleagues.
Final question: what idiot or knave thought Drew would make an ideal choice for Garda Commissioner, given his extensive links in the past with MI5?
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