Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 16 October 2013

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality

Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals: Discussion with Department of Justice and Equality

9:45 am

Mr. Andrew Munro:

Yes. The implications for us would be particularly challenging. Let us take, for example, the power of arrest for the purposes of investigating an offence. That power of arrest and most of the powers that are given to member of the Garda Síochána in statute are conferred on individual members and it is an individual member who forms a suspicion, which allows a court directly to interact with the individual member of the force and examine whether the arrest was justified. The model we are discussing does not allow the Garda Commissioner to order individual members to arrest that person. It will involve considerable change for us to amend it. It is possible to change the system. What is proposed is quite a different model from the one we operate.

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