Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

I am glad to see Mr. Dermot Gallagher appointed to this important job. As the Minister said, he is a distinguished civil servant. I can say that while agreeing with everything Deputy Flanagan has said about the manner in which we make these appointments. It is unforgivable that the Minister did not even bother to observe the courtesies of consulting the Opposition before presenting this to the House and presenting Mr. Gallagher for appointment to the President.

That is the way the Minister does business and the way the Government does business, except when it is in a hole in the economy of its own making so deep we are talking about international rescue and it wants the co-operation of the Opposition. It does not want the co-operation of the Opposition, however, when it comes to making important public appointments like this. I do not want to retrace everything Deputy Flanagan has said but it is time we changed the system in this regard if we intend to maintain public confidence.

I say that while welcoming Mr. Gallagher to this important job. I am aware of the service he has done the State up to now and it is typical of the man that he would take a much lower level of remuneration for this job, an aspect of the appointment that has attracted a lot of attention outside the House. I do not want to say more about it, except that I am glad he is in the job.

I agree with the Minister in the remarks he made about the late Mr. Justice Kevin Haugh and the courtesy and imagination he applied to the job before his premature death. It is a hugely important job. All one has to do is read the Morris tribunal reports in respect of what went on in Donegal to know that. However, I am more concerned about the more minor transgressions and allegations of more minor misbehaviour that one gets from time to time.

We know, notwithstanding the eminent and dedicated people who served on the Garda Complaints Board, that it did not work and that gardaí investigating gardaí does not work and does not any longer have public confidence. This is despite the fact the population generally has always been, quite properly, supportive of the Garda Síochána and recognises the role it has played in our society since the foundation of the State. It is in the best interests of gardaí themselves that law-abiding citizens would feel that where allegations of misbehaviour are made against individual members of the Garda, they are independently and without fear or favour investigated. While they could not say that up to now, we now have the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission.

There was a good deal of argument in the House about the nature and so on of the commission, particularly with regard to whether it ought to be a single commissioner rather than a triumvirate and a whole lot of issues that, for good or ill, have been decided. Now, we need to be able to examine the efficacy of the functioning of this body that threw open its doors in May 2007.

Notwithstanding that, no reports have yet been put up on the website and there is only a single report relating to the fatal accident in which a young man, Derek O'Toole, was killed in Lucan by a car driven by an off-duty garda. The only report on the website states that the commission is not investigating that matter for reasons the late Mr. Justice Kevin Haugh set out in a number of items of correspondence with me.

I do not want to draw any conclusions or for any conclusions to be inferred from what I am saying about the tragic circumstances in which young Derek O'Toole lost his life. I am very concerned about the fact a newspaper immediately put abroad the word that he was known to the gardaí. He was not known to the gardaí and while this was subsequently established, it was leaked by a garda. This was the aspect examined by the commission and it did indeed believe it had identified the garda. However, the manner in which the PULSE system is operated did not enable it to say it was this particular garda because he could say others were logging on to the same system and it may not be him. That is entirely unsatisfactory. I am somewhat concerned that at this stage we do not have reports on which we can yet measure the performance of this very important body.

I agree with what Deputy Flanagan has said about the exclusion of minor cases, which would be entirely wrong. I do not know what the Minister said about this matter as I cannot find it in his script — I must apologise for not being in the House when he spoke, as I was at another meeting. The exclusion of minor cases would be wrong, and while there is minor and minor, I would be worried about this for the reasons already outlined.

The most controversial case on the desk of the new chairperson of the tribunal is the case of international drugs trafficker Kieran Boylan, his relations with members of the Garda Síochána and the related question of why a nolle prosequi was entered by the DPP in the matter of Boylan having been caught in possession of €1.7 million worth of cocaine and heroin. Boylan had already been convicted and imprisoned in the UK and in Ireland, albeit for a surprisingly short sentence, for serious drug offences. He is a major importer of drugs into this country. While on bail, he was caught red-handed in Ardee, in the Minister's constituency, with cocaine and heroin valued at €1.7 million. Incredibly, the charges related to this seizure were struck out and only re-entered after members of this House raised the issue. However, that was not the only amazing development. On 31 July 2008, on the last day of the courts session before the summer recess, although not listed for mention and without notice, a nolle prosequi was entered on behalf of the DPP. Questioned by the judge, the senior counsel for the DPP stated only that "it is a matter for very, very careful consideration at a high level".

Drugs have ravaged some of our communities, destroyed the lives of young people, caused the murder of innocent civilians and, of course, provoked a spate of gangland killings that are still under way. How could the prospects of putting behind bars such a serious drugs dealer, importer and criminal be undermined by a decision at a very "high level"? The only reasonable inference is that Boylan was saved from prison by the intervention of corrupt gardaí or that he was protected because he is a Garda informant.

Mr. Justice Morris dealt with this issue of informants after the Donegal nightmare. The key requirement of the new informant system that he recommended would have required that all informants would be registered compulsorily and that a full assessment of the suitability of the informant would be undertaken by crime and security branch; there would be provision for oversight and periodic independent audits of the operation of the informant handling procedure; and so on. That could not have happened in this case and it raises questions about whether such a critical recommendation of Morris has actually been implemented.

Since the DPP has announced that in certain circumstances he may be willing to provide public information in certain cases where he declined to prosecute, there appear to be compelling reasons why he should explain his decision in the Boylan case. As I understood the "Prime Time" programme, the inference is that Boylan is not a registered informant but has a relationship with individual gardaí and because of this the criminal prosecution system moved to protect him. I do not rule out the possibility of an explanation but most law-abiding citizens will have great difficulty envisaging what greater good could possibly justify the surreptitious entry of a nolle prosequi in the circumstances described.

The findings of the Garda Ombudsman Commission in this case will be a benchmark against which that body will be judged by law-abiding citizens for the future. If there is an explanation why a man importing poison and death should be exempt from the criminal justice system we should be told what it is.

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