Ms Fiona Crowley:

With regard to what my colleague from the Irish Traveller Movement said, the information revealed by the report on the attitudes within the service was very useful. The study should be repeated regularly. However, it actually points to the need not to lose focus on the internal systems of the Garda itself and the initiatives it needs to drive forward. It is arguable that those attitudes were adduced and presented because it was an audit conducted by the Garda itself. It was externally commissioned but not imposed on the Garda, which is novel. It undertook to do the audit and, therefore, its membership felt engaged and confident that it should and could reveal the very negative attitudes.
When Ireland was being subjected to its universal periodic review by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011, a number of states made a recommendation, flowing from the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’s report on Ireland, that the Garda examine the allegations of racial profiling. The then Minister rejected out of hand any suggestion that the Garda could engage in racial profiling and declined to accept any of the recommendations. It needs to be an assumption or almost a default position that there will be racial profiling unless it is identified and rooted out.