Mr. Mark Kelly:

Thank you, Chairman. I am accompanied by my colleague, Mr. Walter Jayawardene, communications manager at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. We are appearing before the committee with a certain sense of déjà vu. The committee will have seen in the submission forwarded that we both provided our submission of April 2014 but we also did something we would not usually do for an Oireachtas committee, that is, we resubmitted an old document from November 2006, entitled Implementing Morris [the Morris being the Morris tribunal]: An Agenda for Change: Placing Human Rights at the Core of Policing in Ireland. A central thrust of that document eight years ago was to look at what we saw as gaps in the 2005 Garda Síochána Act, the subject being dealt with today. It is clear to us that we are in a situation, as my colleague, Mr. David Joyce, has outlined, where human rights had not been placed at the core of policing in Ireland and that in our submission now needs to happen.
I want to touch briefly on four major points in our April submission and I would be happy to come back to it if the committee has further questions. On the powers of GSOC, again my colleague, Mr. David Joyce, has touched on the issue. So far as the Irish Council for Civil Liberties is concerned, there is a need to increase the inadequate powers that GSOC currently enjoys under the 2005 Act. Our view is that should be done subject to the overarching principle that GSOC should be responsible for the investigation of every complaint against a member of the Garda Síochána. It would be nice to hear from GSOC today as some form of categorical reassurance that that is also its own approach. More specifically, there are four additional things we would like to see GSOC empowered to do. It should have the power to investigate the Garda Commissioner, which it does not have; it should have access to the PULSE system directly and not through the intermediary of serving members of the Garda Síochána; it should have the power to receive complaints from serving officers, and we have seen vividly in recent days the consequence of it not having that power; and specifically under section 106 of the 2005 Act, there is a need for GSOC to have the power to conduct a review of practices, policies and procedures on its own initiative in order that it can look at and extract systemic factors that arise from patterns of complaints. Currently, it needs the consent of the Minister for Justice and Equality to do that and that should change.
Second, in regard to the Garda authority, I refer to our submission of November 2006 when we said, and it remains true, that civic oversight is the missing piece in the Garda accountability jigsaw. There is a wide consensus that this should happen. We welcome the fact that the Government has said it will happen and in a relatively short timeframe. In my opening statement I will not go into detail on the substance of what we think a Garda authority should do. Not long ago an interesting paper was prepared by Deputy Anne Ferris and Senator Ivana Bacik on this subject and we have had regard to that. We will make a detailed submission to the Cabinet committee on justice reform with a deadline of the end of this month. I am happy also to forward a copy of that submission to the committee if it considers it would be of interest to it in its work.
Third, the Garda Inspectorate is created by Part 5 of the 2005 Act. In our April submission we reflected on whether, given the other changes in the architecture of Garda accountability that we are anticipating, there would still be a need in future for the Garda Inspectorate because the cardinal point we would like to convey about the inspectorate, arising from section 117(2) of the 2005 Act, is that despite misapprehensions to the contrary, the Garda Inspectorate is not an independent body.We have set out section 117(2) in full on page six of our submission. In a statutory sense, it is a creature of the Minister. That is the way in which it is set up under the 2005 Act. I have to confess that it was with some measure of astonishment yesterday afternoon that we learned from the new Minister for Justice and Equality and the Taoiseach that it is the inspectorate that is to be asked to carry out a comprehensive inquiry into serious crime investigation, management, operational and procedural issues in the light of the Seán Guerin report. This was presented as being part of a package of measures in response to the Guerin report whereas in our understanding, and this is something the committee might come back to with the representative associations later in the day, more than a year ago, under appendix 3 to the Haddington Road agreement, it was agreed that the inspectorate would conduct a limited review into structure, organisation and staffing of the Garda Síochána and into the deployment of members and civilian staff to relevant and appropriate roles. This was referenced just a fortnight ago by then Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Alan Shatter, in the Dáil. This review, essentially, is a review of a human resources dimension arising from the Haddington Road agreement. If it is now being proposed that the terms of reference given to the Garda Inspectorate under appendix 3 to the Haddington Road agreement should be expanded to look at the investigation of crime, then we should have some clarity on that. Even if that is the Government's proposal, in the view of the ICCL it does not constitute a robust and independent inquiry into Garda malpractice identified in the Guerin report.

Lastly, I endorse the comments made by my colleague, the acting chairman of the Irish human rights and equality commission. It is now seven years since Ireland signed - it has yet to ratify it - the optional protocol to the UN convention against torture and we do not yet have the independent, national preventive mechanism required under the treaty, one of the functions of which would be to carry out independent inspections in Garda stations. This is another significant lacuna. If the committee is looking at the 2005 Act in the whole, this missing piece should be included.