Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for not having been here earlier today. I was unavoidably elsewhere. With regard to the points made earlier by Deputies Murphy and McDonald, we raised with Mr.Howard the issue of the letter he wrote to the Commissioner in his final days in office. It refers to Mr. Culhane's letter about the draft report, a very serious letter. What we as a committee were concerned about in the previous meetings was the question as to whether efforts were made by senior Garda management to in some way block what was being carried out by internal audit. That is why we took a serious view of that letter and the whole tone of it. Mr. Culhane did in fact withdraw parts of it here in public session at the last meeting. We are now at the end of our public hearings and we will want to do a report in the coming weeks. We have indicated that we want to know, and we asked Mr. Nugent the last day, what the response was to that letter. The Commissioner says that that is still being considered and we have not got a response. That puts us as a committee in a position that, as of now, that letter still stands as it was written as a reflection of a senior manager's view on what the internal audit was doing. As of now, nobody has seen fit to respond to us and tell us that that is not reflective of senior Garda management.

We will need a response very promptly on the Commissioner's view on that letter. Otherwise we can conclude , in the absence of a response, that we have no response. Does the Commissioner understand the point?