Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

What I have put in place, and what I stand over completely, is that for the purposes of sovereign Government and accountability to this House, if a dispute arises as to whether a file in the possession of An Garda Síochána should be made accessible to the Executive power of this State, it should only be accessible if the most senior civil servant in my Department, who is not under my direction in this regard, concurs and demands the production of that file. The alternative view would simply be that alone among the sovereign states of the European Union the Irish State would be one in which the police service could withhold matter from the Government in circumstances where the Government wants to carry out its proper function.

The amendments I tabled provide that it is not a matter of political decision. Before it is possible to demand the production of documents the second most senior public servant in the State, the Secretary General of my Department, must have the view that such a demand is appropriate.

The alternative view, and it is not a theoretical view, is that the decision on what the Government could see in any particular circumstance would be vested in the Commissioner of An Garda Síochána or somebody else. The Irish State would be one in which it was possible for the police, collectively or singly, to conceal records in their possession from the Executive of the day and the Minister responsible if it suited the police force. I am not willing to live with that regime under any circumstance.

If it is the case that Members of this House, particularly the Labour Party, can put out a statement without referring once to the role of the Secretary General of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, and that we must now address the issue of who has responsibility for and the power to procure documents in the possession of the police force, let me say unequivocally that for better or worse it must vest in the Government elected by the people.

One of the points Mr. Justice Morris made in his report is central to many of the issues we are dealing with. The Executive of the State must remain informed and be in a position to inform itself of every development in An Garda Síochána which it is appropriate for it to know. If we depart from that principle and vest in others the right to deny the Executive of the day, Members of the Oireachtas in committee or any other group of democratically elected politicians the right to know what the police have or have not in their possession in extremis a violence is done to a fundamental constitutional principle. It should not be permitted to happen or ever to be repeated.

I make these points not because I want to know what is in my political party colleagues' files, if such exist. It is because I want a senior public servant, the Secretary General of my Department, with his or her independent judgment to be able to decide whether I am to be left unaware or to be informed of the truth and the full facts of a Garda Síochána investigation or Garda activities when I stand up in this House.

Any departure from that principle is wrong. Other people deciding what a Minister could or could not know strikes at the heart of a Minister's accountability to this House. Ignorance and limited access to the truth puts the Minister of the day at a massive disadvantage with regard to accountability. When the issues that have arisen in recent times as to the adequacy and appropriateness of Garda management come into focus in this House, everybody on all sides of the House is entitled to know that the Minister of the day can responsibly and through a senior public servant require production of all papers so this House is not operating on a rationed and edited version of the truth.

That proposition is self-evident and should not be attacked or criticised. This House, through its Minister, is entitled to remain in democratic control of the exercise of police force powers in this State. Nobody should be in a position to deny this House accountability or the proper channel of accountability if a responsible non-political person has decided on the basis of all the facts available that there should be no such interruption of the flow of facts or information to this House.

We should have a three-person ombudsman commission. We should have a chairperson who is a visible head in charge of the administration of that commission. It is appropriate for that commission to be able to subdivide and delegate its work among its members. All of the arguments made for the "Nuala O'Loan model"— and I use the phrase with the utmost respect — are well met by the amendments tendered by the Government.

All of the advantages put forward by the Government for a multi-person commission are preserved by the amendments put forward by the Government. In those circumstances it should not be the case that this House, having participated in developing legislation should at this stage revert to a simplistic view that unless one person is doing the job it is not being done properly. That is equivalent to stating that one cannot have a multi-member Supreme Court, or three judges dealing with important cases in the Special Criminal Court or the Court of Criminal Appeal.

Having more than one mind operating on an issue has many advantages including transparency, stability, continuity and effectiveness. I make no apology to this House for standing by all of the advantages of a multi-member body. At the same time I concede the reasonable case put by others for having a visible, identifiable publicly accountable figurehead discharge the function rather than an anonymous body corporate. I have made the changes I believe are reasonable in the circumstances, and having made them I believe this House should accept them as a reasonable compromise for a sovereign State with a larger territory and a larger, more diverse police force to carry out this supervisory and complaints function rather than the arrangements that arise in Northern Ireland. If the Patten Commission had come up with a three-person body in Northern Ireland at the time and I had come up with a single——

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