Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 14 February 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality

Garda Homicide Statistics: Discussion

10:30 am

Mr. Michael Finn:

That was the difficulty in April. We had conducted an internal review of the investigations. We did not go back to the analysts. That is where the issue arose, as raised by the Policing Authority. We went back and sat down with the analysts and agreed on how we would classify and how the crime counting rules would be interpreted in the 41 incidents. The initial review had focused on the investigations and whether an investigation had been carried out. It looked at the information gathered on the post mortems, the covering note on the files sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions, at whether directions had come back from the Director of Public Prosecutions, the verdicts of the courts or the Coroner's Court. That was the type of information we had gathered on the investigations, but the analysts still had concerns that we had not looked at the classifications. That is why we went back to review them again.