Lynn Ruane (Independent)

I will go back to two issues. Picking up on the point about the Mothers Against Genocide, I am going back a step on that in terms of whether the Commissioner feels their arrests in general were a necessary use of police time given that it was a peaceful protest. They were not blocking anyone from entry during that given time and there is a right to protest. Lots of steps could have been taken to de-escalate any sort of situation without ending up in a Garda station in the first place. We have several women saying they had visual cavity searches.

I am confused. There were several Garda stations and several points at which women are saying they were subject to a strip search or a visual cavity search, and there are different experiences emerging from different stations. The investigation or inquiry on the Commissioner's behalf into what happened consisted of a discussion on feedback from the arresting police or those who were present in the police stations. What verified for the Commissioner that this did not happen was that in each of those locations there were people outside the doors and they were able to say they could hear verbal, or non-verbal, instructions from inside those rooms. The Commissioner stated that the people outside the doors clarified what happened within the rooms, cells or whatever locations the searches supposedly happened. Will he walk me through that? I am sure people outside a door cannot hear a visual cavity search. Is the Commissioner saying that those people said there is a script that is used during a search and that is all that was said. What exactly was said? I am struggling to understand how that determination could be made from conversation. I am not sure the police conduct investigations in general when accusations are made by just having a light conversation around such an incident. Will the Commissioner explain that further?