Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I regard this commission as an effort to smother a political problem in the midst of a larger problem. I acknowledge that there is a need to address the extraordinary incidence of taping in Garda stations, although there is a puzzle here which I have never been able to solve. Nobody seems to have known about this until a few weeks ago. The Taoiseach, the Minister for Justice and Equality and everyone else in this House will know at this stage that the contract for that particular operation was openly and publicly advertised on e-tenders in 2007. A renewal of that contract was openly and publicly sought - I am not sure if it was every three years or every year; I cannot remember. There was also an annual maintenance contract. Yet, it comes as a total shock to everybody in the Government, the Department of Justice and Equality and, apparently, most gardaí that this was happening. That does not make sense.

The real problem here is that while this may need to be investigated and the operation of it certainly needs to be investigated, even if people are pretending they did not know anything about it, what we really need is an answer to the immediate question which is so threatening to the administration of justice in this country. It is shocking that we are not going to get an answer to the question as to what happened in the Department of Justice and Equality in those ten or 15 days when a letter languished there, unseen and unknown by anybody, apparently, and apparently not of any great importance. That is the question that needs to be answered initially. The Taoiseach may not acknowledge it but everybody in this House knows it.

The confidence of the people in what is happening in the Department of Justice and Equality is at nought at the moment.

It is a secretive Department which obfuscates and is unwilling to impart any knowledge to members of the public or the media. As long as that continues, public confidence, not only in the Garda and the Government but also in the administration of justice, will continue to diminish. It would have been right and proper for an investigation to have taken place immediately to find out what happened in those missing days. While they may be wrong, no one believes the version that we are being given at the moment that somehow no one of importance knew anything about it. We are being given cock-and-bull fairy tale stories about what happened to that letter. Some of them concerned bereavements, for which we all have sympathy, but there were others about people being too busy because they were attending book launches and press conferences. I have heard nonsense in this House, but that is absolutely misleading rubbish.

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