Mr. Justin Kelly:

I will address a couple things. On the presumption of innocence, as the Senator well knows, everything we do in this area is governed by legislation. The Criminal Evidence Act 1992 was amended, and we work under the good practice guidelines, which were drawn up under a Circuit Court judge. That is what we work under. Those are from 2003. Everyone who does this is highly trained and highly selected. As the Senator referred to, many cases have gone through the rigours of the trial process. On the presumption of innocence, I do not see any risk around that.

The Senator asked specifics around the interviewers. Forgive me, we take it that people understand this. In An Garda Síochána, we have a thing called the Garda Síochána interviewing model. There are four levels of that, and it is all regular interviewing of people. When you start out, you start at level 1, which is the basic interviewing of witnesses and suspects. Level 2 is a bit more advanced crime. Front-line officers are able to do that type of interviewing. Level 3 is homicide and organised crime – that level of interview. Level 4 is our top level of interviewing, which is around co-ordinating multiple arrests for, for example, organised crime, complex homicides and that type of thing. We do a whole separate stream of interviewing for non-child interviewing. On the child-specialist side, as I said earlier to Senator Ruane, that is a whole other area. We have a whole specific area. The crime training faculty in our Garda College deals with all this. They are the only people to do the training. We have spent much time, energy and resourcing on international best practice around all this type of work. All the training manuals, procedures and policies are in place for all of this. We have a robust system. I take some comfort in that many of these cases have been through the trial process and we have many convictions of perpetrators in this area.