Commissioner Simon O'Brien:

Good afternoon, Chairman and committee members. As the committee is aware we are a three member commission and propose that each of us in turn will present some of our thoughts to the committee.

We were appointed by the President on 12 December 2011, and last year we published our corporate strategy. Timeliness in completing fair, proportionate, independent and impartial inquiries was at the heart of our approach. We found that many of our investigations were open for far too long. We firmly believed that this situation was not satisfactory in giving redress to the people complaining to us, nor to the gardaí being complained about.

The main reason for delays has been the difficulties encountered in the collection of information and evidence. Requests to the Garda Síochána for information necessary to advance investigations were not being completed within the timeframe of 30 days agreed in protocols concluded under the Garda Síochána Act 2005. In one case we waited 542 days for a request to be completed and the vast majority were well over the agreed time limits, often by excessive periods. While some matters were complex, most were routine. We take some responsibility for this; we were conscious that independent oversight is a new experience for the Garda Síochána. We had sought to achieve negotiated co-operation and did not always trigger agreed escalation processes immediately.

There was also another very worrying trend in our interactions with the Garda Síochána. On many occasions, when requesting information, we were being asked to state why it was relevant to our inquiry. That one State body, investigating another, should be asked for the relevance of a request before materials pertinent to an investigation are released is a matter of considerable concern. I doubt that the Garda Síochána would readily accept such demands from parties under investigation by it. No such qualification was ever agreed in the protocols and these types of back and forward communications also added delay to an already unsatisfactory process. This commission addressed these matters, along with others, robustly and also made sure that overdue requests were correctly escalated. We also made representations at the very highest level of the Garda Síochána and we did begin to make some headway.

The current commission had been in place for 18 months and had been wrestling with these issues assertively but quietly over that whole period. We had hoped, however, that by the time of publishing our 2012 annual report this spring we could have put any comments on these issues in the past tense. Alas, when that date approached, there were still problems. In fact, just prior to publication, we were again being asked to justify the relevance of a request for evidence pertinent to a complex investigation. The commission was of a clear mind that many of the very important issues were unresolved and are still unresolved and as such we decided to make public comment on the issue in our annual report. This was in an attempt to unblock these fundamental matters and shed light onto what had been happening. We will, of course, be happy to take questions but I will hand over to my colleague, Commissioner Carmel Foley.