Ms Lois West:

The second phone call I made was on 16 May. It was very much the same as the first liaison, which was that I spoke to a lady. I believe there was a message conveyed and no meeting resulted. I had made contact at that stage because of my deep concerns over what had played out in the week to two weeks prior to that. As I noted in my statement, I had written a lengthy letter internally within the organisation on 11 May 2017. When I made that call on 16 May, I was quite surprised to hear that the letter had been seen by the authority. I could only conclude that it was my letter of 11 May, which I had not shared with the Policing Authority. That was an internal document, so I am not sure how it came into possession of that.

We then wrote a letter to the Policing Authority on 30 June, which was obviously the day after the 29 June public Policing Authority meeting. I suppose our frustration was escalating at that stage. We had ongoing concerns. We were not happy about how the meeting had played out on 29 June. We received a response to that letter on 12 July, which was really asking if the letter could be shared with Garda colleagues for their response. I understand, of course, everybody has to be able to give their explanation or reasons they said certain things. However, because we felt under pressure and that the workplace was not the best place to be, we did not want to complicate matters further for ourselves at that time. We then received an acknowledgement of the letter we sent on 19 July, declining at that time to share that letter. We offered to help the authority in any way we could. I suppose at that stage we probably felt that some protections would have to be offered to us if we were going to be exposed to Garda colleagues as it were. The acknowledgement we got back from 19 July was maybe a bit dismissive. The content was that it was noted with thanks.