Ms Justice Mary Ellen Ring:

I will start by responding to what the Deputy said about the change in culture. It is a case of the chicken and the egg, in many ways. I accept that some of our changes may require a contemporaneous change of culture. Somebody has got to start. Ultimately, we respond and answer to the public and the Members of the Oireachtas. The Garda should also be responding to the public. We welcome the talk of a change of culture in the Garda Síochána. Like everyone else, we want to see how that talk translates into action. It will not happen overnight. We welcome the commitments that have been made. I hope changes in the training of people coming into the force will deal with matters from the start. We now go to Templemore. We started with the superintendents and we are now addressing the sergeants. I envisage that in time we will meet people as they come into the force so that they recognise who we are, what we do and the importance of what we do. Change takes time. We certainly think we should be clear in what we do.

If we meet resistance from anyone to that, we have to deal with it as it comes along. In terms of co-operation with the hierarchy, we recognise that there have been significant measures, in meeting with us and hearing what we have to say. The difficulty is that when something does not come about, we do not know why because it is a force that operates to its own tune so to speak. We want more information provided to us. It may make decisions but we should get the rationale behind the making of those decisions. When we put in systemic recommendations, we should get a response as to what they are going to do, if anything, with those recommendations. The co-operation we have been getting to date can be expanded and we look forward to that.

We have raised with officials from the Department of Justice and Equality the section 66 provision as being perhaps a way to meet some of our needs in getting information from the Garda. I am sure the Minister is aware of it and that is a matter for her and her colleagues to take it further if they are inclined to do so.

In respect of adding responsibilities to GSOC under the terms of the Protected Disclosures Act 2014, we would like to be able to give more time to those. There is no doubt about it. They are complex investigations. They have certain practical difficulties. If someone comes to us under the protected disclosure legislation even to get records information from the Garda, there have to be channels which we have put in place for getting information from the force. It took some time to work out how best to deal with that. In time, we will understand how many of these complaints are coming in and it would be of benefit to have a team who are skilled, knowledgeable and work in this area only. At the moment the resources are such that they do protected disclosure work with other investigations. My ideal is that we would have a protected disclosure section so that they would know the people within An Garda Síochána they would have to deal with and there would be no mixed messages because they would deal with them consistently. They would be skilled, aware of perhaps the complexities of the force in terms of such complaints, but we do not have those resources yet. That is why considering what areas we can give back to the Garda to free it up would be helpful.