Mr. Mark Kelly:

I thank Deputy Daly for asking an explicit question. We welcome the future role of the office in monitoring detention in Garda stations. For people who end up in prison, very often their detention journey has been a continuum, from the moment they are arrested in the street, transported to a Garda station, placed in a court holding cell, put in a prison van and taken to prison. As someone who has spent the best part of the past 30 years monitoring both police and prison detention, I believe it is extremely important to be able to monitor the protection of rights at every point in that continuum. To give a practical example, when we interview people in private in remand prisons, it provides a very good opportunity to gather detailed information about what their experience has been in Garda stations. It makes sense that with my inspectors and senior inspectors, I have the potential to follow that up. We will be looking at issues including the protection of procedural rights in Garda custody. Chief among these will be access to legal advice and effective access to legal advice. This country has one of the lowest rates in the EU of effective access to solicitors in police custody and I am keen to look at what are the underlying reasons for that. The safeguard is there in law. The possibility for solicitors to be present in Garda stations is there in practice but the take-up rate is very low, which means the potential prophylactic impact of that procedural rights' protection is not being maximised.

To pick up on a point made by the Deputy and also Mr. Herrick from the ICCL, it is crucially important that what we do in future, as the office of the inspectorate of places of detention, dovetails effectively with other accountability mechanisms in the policing area. We are already laying the groundwork for that and consulting the current Policing Authority, GSOC and An Garda Síochána. What we are trying to make sure that we do is to design a future accountability and monitoring mechanism which is complementary to those existing and future mechanisms with policing and-----