Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 14 May 2014

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality

Garda Oversight: Discussion

11:30 am

Ms Fiona Crowley:

That used to be quite a significant programme of work for our then human rights education officer. In the early 2000s, he worked quite closely with the Garda directly, including through the Garda working group that I mentioned earlier, in looking at the sort of training practices that were used. It was mainly about trying to make human rights and diversity training into a mainstream aspect of training rather than having them seen them as adjuncts and not really as core constituent parts of recruit and in-service training. That was quite successful.

That then moved on to what was mapped out in the Garda audit, what Dr. Hogan referred to as the Ionann report, which also looked at Garda training. That became part of the remit of the members of the Garda strategic human rights advisory committee. That is an ongoing programme of work within the committee on an ongoing basis, reviewing the nature of the embedding and mainstreaming of human rights and diversity training within the service. My colleagues might want to come in on that.