Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

I am glad of the opportunity to speak on this important, albeit long awaited and delayed, Bill. A prominent member of the SDLP described the Good Friday Agreement as "Sunningdale for slow learners". Slowly, the Government has accepted the requirement for reforms mirrored in this legislation. The issue of policing is an extremely important one for any civilised society. The police force is the bulwark for any community in order to maintain an ordered society governed by the rule of law. We seek such a society where citizens can avail of rights while exercising their duties and responsibilities, where disputes are arbitrated upon by the courts, and where legislation is enforced by a focused police force acting within the law.

Our history is a good one in terms of policing and we are fortunate to have a force such as the Garda Síochána. Its members have steadfastly defended the State against a variety of threats, including protracted armed criminal subversion. In all too many cases, including one of which I am aware in my home town of Wexford, the ultimate sacrifice was required. Members of the Garda Síochána have literally laid down their lives to protect this State, our Constitution and our laws. Therefore, in conducting a debate on the Garda Síochána it is incumbent upon us — and I want to be open and honest in my analysis, in a warts-and-all manner — to place on the record of the House a clear acknowledgment of the debt that both the State and its people have to the Garda Síochána. No less than any other institution of the State, the Garda Síochána has been evolving and developing just as the State has been doing. During Question Time we discussed many of the pressure points of changes in ethnicity, population base and structure and disposition of population. All these matters impinge on the nature of policing, the training for it and the quality of the individuals we call to police us. They are important, and the structures put in place in the mid-1920s if unmodified, cannot be expected to be appropriate for today.

The Garda Síochána needs to be reviewed in terms of its changing role, structure and an increasing demand across all sectors of public administration and public life for transparency and accountability. There are Members of this House for whom the mention of transparency and accountability makes their hair stand on end because they are over-used and hackneyed words. However, all other elements of public administration, including politicians such as ourselves in this House, have had to face the need for reform. We have done so in a variety of legislative measures we put in place to impact on our conduct, such as the electoral Acts, beginning with the Electoral Act 1997, which I had the privilege of introducing in this House. For the first time, this brought transparency in donation statements, requirements for declarations of Members of the House and it capped election expenditure so there would at least be a transparent mechanism for the conduct of political business. That was mirrored by the Ethics in Public Offices Act and the Freedom of Information Act, both additional groundbreaking enactments which introduced changes for political activity.

We have seen other legislation impacting on the business community as business scandals showed the need for change in banking. God knows there have been enough banking scandals to show that we needed to tighten our company law and strengthen the entitlements of individuals who do business with banks. That has been achieved through the appointment of IFSRA and other regulatory authorities. The public service too has been transformed through the strategic management initiative and others enactments such as the Ethics in Public Offices Act which impacted on senior public servants as well as on politicians. All of this characterised a wind of change blowing through public administration, and the Garda Síochána is not immune from the necessity of addressing that climate of change.

It was in that context that as justice spokesman several years ago I produced proposals for reforming legislation. I promulgated two separate pieces of legislation at the time — the Garda Síochána Authority Bill, which would have established an independent, transparent and publicly accountable authority to run and set the operation parameters for the Garda Síochána, and the Garda Ombudsman Bill, which would have established an independent monitoring system to process complaints about Garda activities. I said at the time that I did not pluck the details of those pieces of legislation from the sky. I relied heavily on the root and branch work done by the Patten commission in Northern Ireland, one of the most exhaustive analyses of what would constitute effective policing in a not entirely dissimilar jurisdiction. It contained very good models, ideas and proposals which could be replicated in this jurisdiction. It is interesting that the response of the then Minister for Justice, the current Minister's predecessor, was one of scorn and dismissal. That was the original reaction I got to the proposals I outlined. According to the then Minister, Deputy O'Donoghue, there was no need for any structural reform.

I welcome this slow evolution, away from downright opposition to the acknowledgment for the need for reform and the inclusion in the legislation of many of the provisions I set out a few years ago. It is a pity is has taken so long because the country and the Garda Síochána would have been better served had the legislation been enacted when I proposed it. Once this Bill is enacted, what will go on the Statute Book will not be very dissimilar to the proposals I put forward.

I have noted the general importance of policing and the debt of gratitude we have as a State to the competence, professionalism and skill of the Garda Síochána over the decades in the face of a genuine threat to the survival of our constitutional democracy. I need to mention the downside because the context of all the proposals I put forward was the backdrop of the information I received regarding the activities of certain gardaí in Donegal. At the time, there was a blanket refusal by the then Minister to have an inquiry into those matters. Unfortunately, that refusal lasted too long and it was quite some time before it was proven beyond doubt that an investigation was required, and the Morris tribunal was established.

I do not want to digress from the contents of the Bill, but the Morris tribunal reveals an extraordinary set of circumstances whereby the principals at the heart of the investigation being carried out by Mr. Justice Morris, the extended McBrearty family and associates, have not had their legal fees guaranteed in advance, so that they are precluded from feeling that they can participate fully in the inquiry. I hope the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform will address this extraordinary and unjust set of circumstances and I understand he will meet the McBrearty family this week.

We will have further debate on that matter in due course and I will not dwell on it today. There are other matters, such as the Abbeylara incident, which this House originally sought to investigate. Unfortunately, because of legal decisions, that matter is the subject of a further tribunal. Other disturbing cases include the investigation into the tragic Grangegorman murders in which two women were stabbed to death in March 1997. A suspect, Dean Lyons, was first questioned in July 1997, in a session which was electronically recorded. The recording indicates a person who was incoherent and lacked the ability to express himself properly. The man was clearly a heroin addict. Subsequently, however, he made a written statement to gardaí in the Bridewell that was lucid and clear and which contained key information relating to the murders which could have been known only to the investigating gardaí and the murderer. Clearly, Dean Lyons could not have committed the murders. That has now been acknowledged and an apology has issued, many years after the event. I raised the issue at the time.

Other cases include that taken against Colm Murphy with regard to the Omagh bombing of 1998. In that case, the court criticised two Garda witnesses. The judge said the two named gardaí had been involved in persistently lying under oath. The Paul Ward case is another, and there are more cases I will not list, but I note all these as a backdrop for the requirement for reform.

I said that I used as my template the Patten proposals because they merited being taken seriously and were a good template to replicate in this jurisdiction. The methodology used by Patten was outlined by my colleague Deputy Costello in some detail. It was an exhaustive, consultative process that looked at effective policing in a jurisdiction not 1,000 miles removed from ours and which clearly had lessons to teach us. The principle enunciated in the Patten Commission report was simple, but important: "Every member of the force must remember that his duty is to protect and help members of the public, no less than to apprehend guilty persons." It is important that the duty is to protect and help the public and not simply, although an important part of the job, to apprehend the guilty.

I will mention some details of the Labour Party proposals I had the privilege to produce some years ago. One proposal was the establishment of a Garda authority. This remains a good proposal because it gives a democratic, overarching ownership of policing, which is important in a democracy. It makes policing part of and accountable to the community, not an extraneous force or part of some authoritarian regime separate from the community. A Garda authority is an extremely good mechanism to give that clear manifestation.

A second proposal was the establishment, on the Northern Ireland model, of a Garda ombudsman. During my discussions I met the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan, and she came to Dublin and met other Members on the matter of fleshing out our proposals. She has been a remarkable champion of justice and vindicator of good policing and has proven the robustness of the Northern Ireland model. It surprises me that after such a clear manifestation that it is the right model, we did not replicate it. The Minister has determined otherwise and I will deal with his proposals shortly. I also met the chairperson and the deputy chairperson of the Northern Ireland policing board to get the flavour of how they saw policing evolving.

The Minister's proposal with regard to an ombudsman proposes to establish an ombudsman commission rather than an individual ombudsman. I will not quibble with the Minister's proposal, but it is surprising that a manifestly effective proposal in place in Northern Ireland was not replicated. I hope the Minister's proposal for a commission is not different for the sake of being different or not accepting a proposal put forward by the Labour Party some years ago. The yardstick and test of it will be whether it is an effective investigative mechanism that will allow thorough and fair investigation and have separate preservation and control of evidence and freedom of action. The proof of that will be apparent as the proposals come into effect.

Another proposal in the Labour Party document of the time was a proposal for a police liaison committee modelled on the strategic policy committees — I had just left the then Department of the Environment — to involve elements of the community in discussing policing. Everybody knows that policing is a community issue. I thought then and still believe the SPC model would be a good one. That proposal has evolved in the Minister's proposals for joint policing committees. They are welcome and I hope they will be equally effective.

The challenges facing the Garda Síochána occur at two levels. There is a national challenge of criminal gangs which were effectively dealt with after a period with the establishment of the Criminal Assets Bureau. Some of the gangs operating were crushed, jailed or fled the jurisdiction. Unfortunately, they have been replaced by even more vicious thugs who, as we have seen in recent times, clearly have no regard for life and readily engage in violent murder. At local level, as the leader of the Labour Party has said repeatedly, the issue of anti-social behaviour is blighting neighbourhoods throughout the country. While mainly in the larger urban centres, anti-social behaviour occurs in every community.

We have some legislation to deal with anti-social behaviour. In our time in Government we brought in the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act to deal with anti-social behaviour in local authority housing. However, we need to go further as the real issue is not legislation. We have the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act and the Intoxicating Liquor Act which have a number of provisions yet to be introduced. It is the effective use of those powers by people who are plugged into their communities that is at the core of effective community policing. If that does not happen, if there are no gardaí who know the people and families in a neighbourhood and who can listen, hear, act and be there, and unless we reconnect with communities, policing will not be as effective as it could be. This is key for the new regimes. Will they reconnect with communities? Will we have designated gardaí to link with and stay in communities in the long term and physically to control the communities and be community gardaí who are friends of their communities, know them and act accordingly?

The issue of the Judiciary is important if we are to have effective policing. We need to revisit the issue of judicial conduct and training etc. This was dealt with by the previous Minister but he abandoned his proposal. We need to come back to it so that we can have judges who know the needs of communities and who will act appropriately and consistently.

We need proper recruitment to the Garda. I know an Irishman who was a commander in a police force elsewhere. He could not come back to Ireland unless he went to Templemore and started again. We need cross-fertilisation with good police from abroad who want to come and work in Ireland. The Minister should be open to that. We have a world class facility in Templemore, but not everybody needs to start at garda level. We must be open to some cross-fertilisation from good effective forces elsewhere.

Section 14 proposes volunteer gardaí. I would like to see this proposal fleshed out. I have no intrinsic opposition to it, but we need to see the detail to know if it is a proposition that will assist effective policing and the Garda rather than be a burden. I support the thrust of the measures in the Bill and wish it had come before the House some years ago.

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