Ms Justice Mary Ellen Ring:

I cannot say what is in the mind of anyone who refers a matter to us except that I hope he or she is following obligations and doing nothing more than that. It is clear from what I have said that in our experience not everything gets referred to us. There is clearly a differentiation between what comes to us or does not come to us. It would be our hope that everything would come to us as a matter of course and then we would not have to think about what is in the minds of the referring parties. It has happened that we have got a referral closely followed by a press inquiry. That is a fact that clearly raises questions for us as to how quickly the press discovers that a matter has come to us and why. I cannot speculate on what is in the minds of people who send matters to us. There are matters that come to us with great speed and they can be followed at even greater speed by queries from the media.

We have spoken about our remit and we have set out in our workflow diagram the restrictions we have. The main restriction, which we have already said we would like to see dealt with under new legislation, comes where citizen A complains about garda B or gardaí B, C and D. It is all we can investigate. In some instances we could go beyond that into a public interest investigation but again we would be looking at individuals.

As we have no role in operational matters, we cannot tell the Garda how to do its job. We can only look at the outcome of the job and whether it displays misconduct, either criminal or disciplinary. Again, under the current legislation, we are back to looking at the actions of A, B or C. If A, B or C is acting in accordance with directions, for instance, then it is not misconduct. If he or she is in a given place for an operational reason, it is not misconduct. If we can look at an incident from the overview of the individuals involved, that may give us more scope. We know it is frustrating when people make a complaint about an incident to GSOC and we have to extract from them or the Garda information on which individuals were involved. The individuals in question may say they were acting in accordance with what they were told to do. All that GSOC can say in such circumstances is that there was no misconduct. We cannot say we thought it was bad judgment or anything about it operationally. We can make recommendations for the future. However, under the current legislation, we do not have recommendation powers and the Garda can, therefore, ignore our recommendations.

GSOC operates in that maze. This affects the expectations the public have of us. We must follow the steps. We have indicated to the Department of Justice and Equality that we would like to have a legislative framework in place under which a complaint, which can be any kind of allegation, results in an investigation that is fair, proportionate and in accordance with the law. Moreover, it should have one of three outcomes, either the matter goes to the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Garda Commissioner or GSOC finds no misconduct by any party. It would be a three-step process, not what the committee has before it.