John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

He is also welcome to examine, without taking it away, the box we originally examined, in order to complete the information gap that seems to be there.

It is a fact that other Members of the House and other committees of the House received similar information from the two whistleblowers. Yesterday we received a letter which was sent to the justice committee on 12 January and received by it on 15 January, which makes further very serious allegations in regard to all of these matters. I am saying this to inform Commissioner Callinan of the work of the committee.

I want to address the issue around the information that is there. The original information from PULSE gives the garda name or number - I forget which it is - and an indication as to which member of the Garda would have taken the action to remove the penalty points. However, one of the whistleblowers, respecting the data protection provisions and leading us to this point, provided us with the information which told us, for example, that a certain number of penalty points were struck out for a particular family. We do not know what family it is. He went to the bother of quantifying the cost of the total loss to the State. He says it runs to €4 million to €6 million, which is not perhaps much different from the figure that is reached when one works out either Assistant Commissioner O'Mahoney's figures or those of the Comptroller and Auditor General.

The Commissioner gave an example earlier of bees worrying livestock. I was struck by a number of examples that were contained in one of the whistleblower's report whereby a senior person had his or her penalty points struck out because he or she was on his or her way to court. The whistleblower went to the bother of finding out that there was no court sitting on the day in question. He also went to the bother of looking into a situation where a garda who was stopped did not receive penalty points because, it was stated, he was on duty. Apparently, several penalty points were at issue here. The whistleblower states that he investigated the case and found that the garda was not on duty when the incident took place and it did not take place in the area where he normally would be working. In fact, he was on sick leave.

I am not saying these things to embarrass the Commissioner or the Garda in any way. I am simply saying that this is the type of information that is circulating around the Oireachtas. Would it not have been possible to bring in the two serving gardaí before one of them retired and have a man-to-man discussion with them in regard to their duty, as they saw it, to report what they considered wrongdoing and, in some cases, what was described as corruption under the definition we gave earlier? As proper members of the force, willing to give this information, they have put their jobs on the line. That is what happens to whistleblowers - they sometimes become the victim. Was it not possible within the force to create a situation where they were brought forward in order to give that information? They provided the information to the committees of the Oireachtas because it was suggested that this was the proper way to do it. There is an issue here in that the matter must be dealt with in some way, because it is damaging the reputation of the force and people are wondering if what we have heard is true or false. That is really what we are about here.