Dan Boyle (Cork South Central, Green Party)

The headlights of the vehicle that brutally and tragically ended the life of Mr. Richie Barron seem to have been metaphorically present in this sorry saga ever since. Every agency of the State has chosen not to use that light to illuminate, to discover or to reveal, but instead stare blankly into that light to induce a type of blindness with which we are still dealing. It seems that what happened in Donegal is sadly all too prevalent in many agencies of this State. There is an attitude at governmental and ministerial level and, as we learned in both reports of the tribunal, within the Garda Síochána itself, that allow circumstances in which truth is already predetermined to have existed and in which facts must be made to fit that truth. If lessons are to be learned from these reports, it must be that we cannot pretend to have an open, fair and democratic society and allow such behaviour to continue.

What I find most dispiriting about this whole affair is that in the second report of the Morris tribunal, the first dozen recommendations are a reiteration of recommendations made in the original report. If anything is to give us confidence that real action is being taken on foot of this controversy, it must be that Mr. Justice Morris feels the need to keep repeating recommendations that the Minister has chosen to ignore.

The report reveals the type of society that exists throughout Ireland. As someone with connections in County Donegal on my father's side, I know that it is a place apart. However, I do not believe that the circumstances that existed there have not been repeated elsewhere. There still seems to be a reluctance, even in this debate, to accept that many of the people involved in this drama came to Donegal from other places. Due to the limitations in the terms of reference of the Morris tribunal, we have not been able to ask questions as to whether such people have practised in a corrupt way in other parts of this country, whether they learned to practise corruption in other parts of the country and whether a web of corruption has been established through their careers and the careers of others they have touched.

That is why the subsequent action of the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform has been so inept. It is why many on this side of the Chamber have criticised what was proposed in the original Garda Síochána Bill and what the Minister has subsequently added on Second and Committee Stages. Many of us feel that Report Stage should not even come before the House next week.

It is more than a case of trying to fiddle around the edges of a system where too many questions continue to be asked. If the Minister is honest with himself, he is not honest with this House. He should accept that there is a need for an independent ombudsman structure, which is not proposed in the Bill and which will not be put in place if he uses the Government majority to establish the ombudsman commission. At the end of the day, we will leave this Chamber with public confidence in the Garda as low as it has ever been due to the efforts of the Minister and his predecessors in dealing with this issue.

It is like Alice in Wonderland where words mean what the Minister wants them to mean and it has now got to a stage where history means what the Minister wants it to mean. In the Minister's opening contribution, we were given an impression that he has been actively responding to the issues involved in this report. This House and the nation know that it has taken the reluctant establishment of the Morris tribunal to bring these issues into the open. A Minister overseeing the justice portfolio on the Government's behalf would not, if he were performing his duties properly, have had to go through this process. Such a Minister should not now have the gall, temerity, audaciousness and arrogance to pretend at the end of the process that he is somehow at the head of the pack.

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