Mr. Mark Kelly:

I thank the Chairman and the Deputy. I have not seen the submission and certainly at the very minimum will watch the hearing this afternoon with close interest. It is the substance that matters. Briefly, it might be interesting to look back to the history of why we have what we have in the 2005 Act. The original proposal brought forward was that there would be something called a Garda Inspectorate that would have ombudsman-type functions. At the time, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and other organisations were highly critical of the proposed model. In particular, we pointed out that if one was to have something that effectively was an ombudsman, one clearly should call it an ombudsman and give it ombudsman-type functions. The nomination of our three colleagues to GSOC - or their predecessors - was the eventual outworking of that. However, there were bits that were left over from the then Government's proposal, which were gathered into Part 5 of the Act, and this unusual statutory creature which we now call the inspectorate was created. There are not many similar models, although, for example, there is something similar within the Ministry of the Interior in Portugal.

To be brutally frank, our view is that the inspectorate, at least as currently constituted, has not really proven its worth. It has done the job it was given to do by statute, but one has heard, for example, that its current chairman never actually had a sit-down face-to-face working meeting with the Minister, who effectively is the line manager of the inspectorate. The essence of what was the aspiration for the inspectorate is extremely important to deliver upon. The existing model plainly has not worked. Our view is that if we are now going to recalibrate - and, in particular, if consideration is being given to the establishment of a Garda authority - there is scope for a Garda authority to do many of the valuable aspects of what the Inspectorate does. In particular, to return to the Northern Ireland Policing Board for one second and then to conclude, one thing it did in its early years was that when it felt it did not have the required expertise within the body, it appointed expert people to come and help it. For example, it appointed a human rights legal adviser, Keir Starmer, who subsequently went on to become a distinguished Director of Public Prosecutions in England and Wales. He did some excellent work in developing monitoring frameworks and audit tools and a range of practical measures, which is exactly the kind of thing a Garda Inspectorate should do. The ICCL is not particularly hung up on one model or another, but we think that if the architecture is to be recalibrated the oversight really should go to bodies that will be genuinely independent and which have that as their tradition and legacy.