“Anything Happen While I Was Away?”

BREEZING into the office this morning at 9.05am, Garda Commissioner Noirin O’Sullivan was the picture perfect definition of a well rested and thoroughly relaxed individual after her brief 5-week stint away from An Garda Síochána.

“Anything happen while I was away?” queried the Commissioner as she leafed through a very sparse pile of post from one of 18 black sacks while speaking with her assistant.

“Only 4,000 emails from the Minister of Justice asking what the hell is going on, so fairly quiet Commissioner,” O’Sullivan’s assistant explained, before launching into the first minute of a 20-hour long brief on the latest development in scandal after scandal the police force has found itself embroiled in.

Battling back suggestions that she took a 5-week ‘holiday’ in the midst of myriad scandals and crises which could go on to define and shape the Nation’s police force for the next 50 years, the Commissioner explained to her assistant that people’s definition of a holiday can be problematic.

“If you call carefully studying the box sets of The Wire, The Shield, Love/Hate, Line of Duty and Cracker while looking for ideas and taking notes a ‘holiday’, well then I guess you’re right”.

Acting from a force of habit the Commissioner then proceeded immediately to the Oireachtas Justice Committee and the Public Accounts Committee to read from a pre-prepared statement outlining how she is the solution and not the cause of all the problems facing the gardaí, only to find the rooms in Leinster House empty.