Commissioner Carmel Foley:

First, under the protocols now being negotiated, and we would hope they are nearly completed, officials from both sides are deciding on the knots we can iron out. Until now there has been a 12 weeks, three months, period for them to complete the disciplinary investigations. They have made the case that given the cumbersome nature of the disciplinary regulations that that is too short and that they would prefer it to extend to four months or 16 weeks. We will agree to operate a 16 weeks interval. However, many of the outstanding files awaiting reply go back longer than 16 weeks. We are suspending judgment, therefore, until we see how the 16 week suggestion will operate but many of them are already over the 16 weeks. That is on the disciplinary side.

Regarding these blockages and communications coming back stating something is not relevant and we are not being given it, that is still happening. We are escalating these queries more quickly than we used to previously. Normally, a senior investigator in our office, when investigating a criminal allegation, has all the powers, privileges, immunities and duties of a garda. I would have thought it sufficient that if a senior investigator is looking for an item, that ought to be enough. As the Chairman said earlier, I cannot see garda detectives accepting someone telling them that they cannot have something and that it is not relevant. However, we have a process of escalation whereby our acting director of investigation goes to a more senior level in the Garda and, if necessary, one of us will go to a very senior level. We are being more robust in operating that system and keeping a very close eye on it. That is the current position on the protocols. As we entered the negotiations in good faith, we would want to give the new system a chance to operate.

There is another issue regarding the way we are delayed in our work. When we opened, one of the regular feeds of information to us from the gardaí came through a copy of each Garda directive as it was made. This is very important because a Garda directive instructs the Garda member on the ground, and the entire Garda force, on what they are and are not entitled to do. The Garda directive gives them their standards of behaviour. If an allegation is made against gardaí, we need to know if that is within their powers, within the directive they have been told to operate under or if it is it something outside their directives. However, we no longer receive the directives automatically. We are told if we want a directive we have to ask for it. We asked them how we will know the directives that have been signed by the Garda Commissioner if they do not at least give us the list of directives that come out, say, every month signed by the Commissioner or disseminated throughout the Garda force nationwide, but we have been told we will not get the list. We are in this Kafkaesque world whereby we are trying to dream up the directives that might have been passed.