Editorial: Drew Harris has served policing on both sides of the border with distinction

​Drew Harris has been reflecting on his time as head of the police in the Republic of Ireland, as we report on page 15.

Mr Harris’s story is a remarkable one. He has been Garda Commissioner since the autumn of 2018, a period of seven years.

Mr Harris spent 18 years in the RUC – it is interesting to read Irish websites that say that he was in the PSNI for 34 years, as if brushing the Royal Ulster Constabulary out of the story of a man who came to lead An Garda Síochána. But the PSNI has not been around for so long – in fact Mr Harris joined the RUC in 1983 and was in it for 18 years until it became the Police Service of Northern Ireland in 2001, before he moved south in 2018.

Mr Harris’s father, Alwyn, was an RUC officer murdered by the IRA. The RUC is very much in the outgoing Garda Commissioner’s hinterland. Yet he rarely makes reference to that appalling murder and does not seek recognition or pity over it.

Mr Harris, as we report today, says that he does not like to be thought of as an outsider, being, as he describes himself, ‘Irish’. Not everyone in Northern Ireland will be comfortable with such a designation, but Mr Harris is reported to have Irish and British citizenship, as many people do.

This newspaper has been scathing about the retrospective vindication of IRA terrorism that has swept nationalist Ireland, an apparent support for past violence that was not there at the time. Sinn Fein were repudiated on both sides of the border by nationalists when IRA terror was ongoing.

But it is very much to the credit of the Irish establishment that it was a prepared to appoint as its chief police officer a man with past steeped in the RUC. That force was, during the Troubles, seen as one of the best in the world.

Mr Harris has served policing well and deserves thanks for his service on both sides of the border