Mr. Niall Hodgins:

I was present that day at Parnell Square as an investigator and I could sense what was building. When I returned to my station later on, I listened to the Commissioner's comments, following the riots. He suggested that nobody could have predicted what had happened. What we have found out since is that a number of months prior to the Dublin riots he saw fit to assign an armed Garda detective to each Minister of the Cabinet, because, I think, he was in possession of information that was of concern to him and possibly posed a risk to the safety of officeholders in this country. It goes back to something which I alluded to earlier and that is slippery language and what I call truth decay in respect of the myriad issues that exist for gardaí. They have all been put in a pot, suppressed and not dealt with. Any dissenting voices on what is happening in the organisation as a whole are pretty much not listened to and there is no participatory governance whatsoever between the associations.