Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to pick up on a few points Ms Feehily made. Ms Feehily said that we, as policy makers, gave her an authority that did not have enough powers. We would like to clarify that we did not give it to her. We introduced a different one with many more powers and Ms Feehily would be in a much stronger position if they had taken on our proposal. For the record, the Fine Gael-Labour Government gave her that one.

I was amused by Deputy Brophy's point about low bars and high bars. It is a bit like pole vaulting. Fine Gael puts it low when it suits it and high when it suits it also.

On the Public Appointments Service, PAS, board, I was making the point that there is a representative from the Department of Justice and Equality and the Department of Public Expenditure on the board. The Policing Authority does not have anyone on the board. I know none of the board will be sitting on the interview panel but they have the power to oversee how the interview panel is structured and how it operates. The question should have been to ask Ms Feehily if she believed the Government has actually more say than her in the selection panel?

Ms Feehily raised the code of ethics. Credit is due to her to get that across the line in December or January but I see from the minutes of the code of ethics committee on 13 March 2017 that there have been difficulties in An Garda Síochána's attitude to embedding the code, for example, where Garda documents included the code as a spoke in the wheel of a diagram of decision making rather than its centre. Nine months have passed since then but does Ms Feehily know if all gardaí have received a personal copy of the code and initial training in applying it in their daily working lives?

The Tánaiste launched it in January 2017 but she did not publicise the fact at the time that several weeks previously, the Government had chosen to quietly enact a statutory instrument, SI 639/2016 during the Christmas 2016 Dáil vacation which downgraded and seriously undermined the effect of the code of ethics. This statutory instrument confirms that breach of the code of ethics can no longer be considered a breach of the disciplinary regulations 2007. What effect does the code of ethics have now? How can compliance with it be enforced and what are the real sanctions for non-compliance?

It would seem that the conduct exposed recently regarding the falsification of the 1.5 million breath tests and the false reporting by senior management of the completion of all 50 recommendations of the Garda Inspectorate report and the apparent reclassification of the homicide figures means that there is little hope that compliance with the code could be encouraged even by way of leading by example as that conduct amounts to flagrant breaches of the first two ethical standards of the code of ethics, namely, the duty to uphold the law and honesty and integrity.

Would the chairperson consider requesting a legislative change in the two-year report when it comes out in January in accordance with the Act so that a breach of the code of ethics might again amount to a breach of discipline regulations 2007?