Mr. Brian Sutton:

A few things need to be said in that regard. First, there are two bodies of work that need to be done by An Garda Síochána. The first is the classification and whether the files were correctly or incorrectly classified and, if they were not classified, the reasons for that. The second is the investigation. Was the investigation carried out in compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights? I will talk the committee through the process. It can happen, and has happened on numerous occasions, in respect of the 41 cases that have been highlighted in 2013, 2014 and 2015, that someone is assaulted in one district, is brought to hospital and dies two months later and this is recorded in that hospital as a sudden death. Then an investigation is conducted and someone is arrested, prosecuted, charged - let us say with murder - and convicted of manslaughter. It still stays on PULSE as a sudden death. The work done by the analysis service looked at the results of the State Pathologist's office and saw blunt force trauma to the head was the cause of death and then looked at the corresponding incidents on PULSE and it went down as a sudden death, not a homicide, so there was a fault there. This concerns the 41 cases. We will look at them, their classification and the reasons they were not updated. There is now a process in place to ensure this does not happen again.

The second part of this is, in compliance with Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to look at the investigation. Of the 41 cases, a number are before the courts and have been dealt with before the courts, a number have been dealt with by the coroner's courts and a number are still live investigations. In compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights, my team will look at the investigations into these cases to see whether they are compliant and whether they are correctly or incorrectly classified. Does that address the Deputy's issues?