John O'Donoghue (Kerry South, Fianna Fail)

——to enable the Minister to exercise his accountability function and the Attorney General to exercise his advisory function.

I remained very concerned about the lack of resolution to the situation in Donegal and the erosion of public confidence in policing. I decided in November 2001 that it was desirable that there should be some independent assessment of the situation. I decided to ask an eminent legal person to examine all the relevant papers and the progress on these investigations generally with a view to receiving expert independent advice as to whether there were measures that might now be taken to bring matters to finality sooner rather than latter.

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