Ms Justice Mary Ellen Ring:

We engage with the public in a limited form on a regular basis and we have a statutory mandate that we have to fulfil. Obviously, it would be great to have more time in terms of education. We brought in people, for example, who are dealing with new communities because we are anxious to be able to make sure that people in new communities who may be having difficulties in their interactions with the Garda come to us.

I mentioned our website. One of the reasons we have to update our website is because there is no information on it in any other language and there should be. We have translation facilities available but we tell people that in English. Clearly, there are members of the public in communities that we may not be reaching. That is added time and effort being put on us in terms of our statutory mandate. I have no difficulty in engaging with the public but I have to do the other functions we have as part of our mandate. The Senator may rest assured that members of the public respond to us in terms of how they feel about what we are doing and what the Garda is doing. We get a great deal of interaction in that regard.

The Senator mentioned recommending court action. We put forward a case to the Director of Public Prosecutions, DPP. We may recommend that the matter go forward for prosecution. We may make no recommendation. In some cases we recommended no prosecution but we send those to the DPP because, ultimately, the decision rests with that office. It is a separate function. We send forward what we see as a good case, just as gardaí send forward cases they see as good cases and there is no prosecution. In other cases where we are not expecting a prosecution, there is one. Those are matters for an official in another office.

In the North they have had the benefit of starting from ground zero in many ways. There was perhaps an old attitude and old issues but there was a new force and the Ombudsman was brought in at the same time. I am aware, from looking at the Dáil debates on the setting up of the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission, GSOC, that a good deal of reference was made to the experience in the North and, for whatever reason, different procedures were adopted here. That is a matter of history at this stage.

The North has its problems. It has very old, ongoing, troubling investigations. We have those problems. There are practical issues north and south of the Border as to how we deal with a case where time has passed and people have died or moved on but, often, the complainant, the victim of a crime, never moves on. His or her memory is very clear, but around them time has meant that experiences or evidence has been lost. That is a challenge. The Garda often cannot deal with that satisfactorily when it receives an oral complaint in respect of a crime that was committed many years ago. That is a challenge that perhaps will have-----