Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is doing his best to ignore the seriousness of this issue. However, I must warn him that it will not go away. He has stated that Members are prejudging the outcome of his internal investigation. That investigation is already substantially discredited. While the Garda Commissioner to whom the Minister referred, Commissioner Callinan, issued a press statement in December in which he told the assembled media there was no question of what has been described as a culture of non-enforcement of penalties being tolerated, in fact that is precisely the culture to which reference has been made. The Minister took it upon himself to send a letter from his Department to the whistleblowing gardaí in the week before Christmas, isolating instances from their reported allegations which he dismissed out of hand. Moreover, when a Deputy presents evidence before this House of other allegations in the dossier, the Minister chose to ignore it because the evidence in his possession shows the response he gave to Deputy Wallace is inaccurate. It is at variance with the evidence and the facts of the matter, namely, gardaí are terminating these penalty points without any reason, without any procedure and are acting as a law unto themselves.

Members are not prejudging anything but are basing their opinions on the evidence. If the Minister thinks that Members of this House or the wider public will put up with the outcome of a so-called internal inquiry, he is greatly mistaken because all the evidence tells us that the aforementioned inquiry already has been discredited, when the gardaí who put their necks on the line to give the Minister this evidence have been approached over Christmas, denied the opportunity to do their jobs, prevented from accessing PULSE records without someone standing over their shoulders, being visited in their own homes by gardaí and so on. That is the type of system and people the Minister wants to investigate the matter. It is a joke. The issue will not go away.

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