Baroness Nuala O'Loan:

The question I would ask is can we for now park the definition of "confidential recipient" and the work done by the confidential recipient and think about the situation in which a serving officer wishes to bring something to the attention of the authorities, having failed to get a response from his or her internal authorities. In that situation, I believe it would be entirely appropriate for GSOC to be the recipient and to have a unit dedicated to such whistleblowing activity. If this were done, the whistleblower would be assured that the person to whom he or she was reporting was independent. However, one would have to buttress that by the introduction of a duty on managers within An Garda Síochána to deal positively with whistleblowers and make it a disciplinary offence not to positively respond to or manage whistleblowing. There is an article in the PSNI code of ethics, which is its disciplinary code, which makes it an offence not to do this. If one does a number of things together then this makes whistleblowing possible.

Whistleblowing is about improving policing. Nobody becomes a police officer to do wrong. Corruption, carelessness and laziness creep in. I would place it within GSOC with a statutory power. I do not believe it would be adequate to have a non-statutory recipient of some type outside that, so I would put it within GSOC and then give it the proper powers and the limited remit. One would not want them dealing with human resource disputes between members and things like that.