Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

I am glad to have the opportunity to speak on the important issue of the Garda ombudsman, or the Garda ombudsman commission, that will in due course have responsibility to ensure that all matters regarding complaints against members of An Garda Síochána are independently analysed and investigated.

I want to return to the issue that is of extreme importance here. It is not simply a matter, serious as that would be, of a conflict of testimony between two Ministers on a matter of the most serious gravity. Our judgment of the conduct of the Government hinges on the issue of when the Minister and the Government had the Carty report. My information is that if they had the essence of the Carty report, it would have been impossible for them not to act and immediately acquiesce to the pressure from this House for a sworn independent inquiry into the clear evidence of wrongdoing that Assistant Commissioner Carty presented in his report. I have not seen his report, but that is the information I have. The problem is much more serious because the two Ministers whose evidence is now in diametric conflict sat around the same Cabinet table — Deputy McDowell as the then Attorney General and Deputy O'Donoghue as the then Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform.

I understood before last Friday that the then Minister, Deputy O'Donoghue, received a copy of the Carty report in the summer of 2000. My belief was based on what I was told by Deputy O'Donoghue in this House on Question Time. I quoted last night the most direct response given by the then Minister that I could find when I looked through all his responses. He said on 23 May 2001 that he had certainly received the report of Assistant Commissioner Carty's investigation. My colleagues have quoted Deputy O'Donoghue's remarks of that date and I will do so again: "the investigation by Assistant Commissioner Carty was completed and presented to me and, in turn, to the DPP."

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