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

The Minister referred to the report's findings as being deeply disturbing and went on to talk about the wider systemic and historical problems in the force. That is the context of this discussion because, as Deputy Wallace has said, for us the Guerin report revealed nothing new. It was just an absolute and utter vindication of the stories we have heard and the experiences we have had over the past two years or do. Most striking was how similar Mr. Guerin's conclusions were to the points we have been making repeatedly in this House, in many instances to ridicule from the Government benches and indeed from some members of the Opposition.

In the main the Guerin report deals with instances in great detail, including the accounts of injustices and insufficient investigations in a number of serious incidents in the Bailieboro area which have had tragic consequences for all of the participants. It then goes on to deal with the issue of the Garda itself. What is striking is the pattern of not properly investigating things, the pattern of investigations being heard. In many instances internally, the complaints of Sergeant Maurice McCabe were actually upheld, but no action was subsequently taken. Mr. Guerin referred to insubordination, a certain lawlessness and so on. We have to be mindful that the people in these stories were people who in many instances had become the victims of crime and had turned to An Garda Síochána for help, which rather than helping actually compounded the difficulty. That is the legacy we are dealing with.

The Guerin report deals with the former Minister for Justice and Equality's absolute abdication of his statutory role in dealing with these matters and the higher echelons of the Department of Justice and Equality. What screamed out at one was the point we made that none of this could have happened without the special relationship that existed both in law and personally between the former Minister for Justice and Equality and the former Garda Commissioner. That relationship led to all of this because, as I said before, the Minister did not do nothing; he went to the Garda Commissioner and asked him about these things, was told a version of events and he just blindly accepted that without even seeing the reports to back that up.

Policing problems are not new. There have been horrific cases over the decades - well in advance of this Government's lifetime - including the 1984 murder of Patrick Nugent in Bunratty, believed to have been at the hands of gardaí and staged as a car accident, the brutal death of 14 year old Brian Rossiter in a Garda station in Tipperary, the fitting up of Nicky Kelly for the train robbery, the Kerry babies case, Abbeylara, Donegal, the repeated United Nations reports on the appalling policing scenario in Corrib and so on. Who is the Government trying to con by saying we did not know about these things? We knew about these things. What made it absolutely worse, and this is the legacy with which the Minister has to deal, is that all of the people, or most of them, who were involved in the heavy gang in the Nicky Kelly case were promoted, as were all of those involved in the Kerry babies case. In the midst of the Guerin report, we saw that the initial investigation and complaint with which Sergeant Maurice McCabe went to the confidential recipient was about the promotion, or putting on a panel for promotion, of somebody who had stood over other lawlessness. What really struck me was the correspondence in the report from the confidential recipient who spelled out to the Minister that, in his opinion, it would undermine decent gardaí and send a wrong signal to promote somebody like that and yet the complaint was not upheld. For us, probably what was really sickening in reading the report - apart from the fact everybody listened to Mr. Guerin but nobody seemed to care that much when we said it - was the level of correspondence that existed in the Department from Sergeant Maurice McCabe and his solicitors, about which we had no knowledge, and stuff we did not know, which it knew. We made points in the House about which we were being rubbished and yet the Department had information which absolutely backed up what we were saying.

This is important because, like the case referred to by Deputy Wallace about former Garda Jack Doyle and the way he was forced out, the Kieran Boylan case shocked the nation. GSOC put its colours to the mast on that one but, in essence, Jack Doyle's story was a forerunner to that where the gardaí basically ran a drug runner and were playing both sides of the camp. The allegation is that somebody in the very high ranks of An Garda Síochána currently was involved in the Boylan case and in that case decades before. I mention the points made by Deputy Doherty, which were previously made by Deputy Luke 'Ming' Flanagan during Leaders' Questions, about the number of sitting gardaí who are reporting instances of gardaí being involved in drug running and so on. We certainly have cases of that. This is a systemic problem.

Now we will have one commission, or two, three or four commissions. We need more than that. The Government has said we need to look at this in a bigger way, with an independent police authority. Professor Dermot Walsh, who is an expert in policing, put this very much in the best way when he said it is less than ten years since the Morris tribunal and all of the reforms promised since then have not worked and asked what is to say that these commissions will yield anything better. They will not yield anything better, although I am not saying we should not have them, but we need something bigger. We need a Patten-style commission where we step out from the ranks of what is there and say what we want in a modern police force in Ireland. The first thing is that we do not want a police force but a police service which is held accountable to the population. The problem with the commission of investigation is that it will deal with specific allegations in Bailieboro. We know of other instances around the country. There are uninvestigated deaths in Tullamore, the pain of the Touhey family and of the Goonan family, incidents in Limerick and malpractice in Cork. I know that Ian Bailey's solicitors were in correspondence with the Taoiseach this week. His legal team put the cost to the State and the taxpayer over the 18 years of the Garda efforts to frame him as being roughly between €40 million and €50 million in Garda overtime and resources. Meanwhile, the murderer of Sophie Toscan du Plantier is still out there and Ian Bailey and his partner have been vindicated, but they have had a horrendous time.

As Deputy Wallace said, there is so much hurt out there as well as cases and we are absolutely snowed under. Citizens and gardaí are coming forward now. It is a good thing that there is an openness developing. I do not know how the Minister will deal with that but there has to be some form of a truth and reconciliation forum because these instances are opening up the hurt many people have experienced. Over the past week, many people have got in touch with us. An event happened to them in their lives before where they were not treated fairly by the gardaí and they suffered other consequences after that and they have not been able to get over it. We need to acknowledge that and deal with it in some way by an apology or whatever.

We need to look at the role of whistleblowers. Sergeant Maurice McCabe and former Garda John Wilson have done the State an enormous service. The Minister should be aware that when the Acting Commissioner acted on her instructions and gave Sergeant Maurice McCabe back access to PULSE, the letter he got was a two-page epistle, four paragraphs of which screamed about his data protection responsibilities as if he, in some way, again had done something wrong when he followed the letter of the law all the way. One has to ask if anything has changed.

I have made the point before that I am aware the former Garda Commissioner requested that the four Garda representative organisations issue a public statement of no confidence in GSOC at the time of the bugging affair. That is absolutely scandalous because GSOC is not fit for office as an institution and, in fairness, the GSCOC commissioners were the first people to flag that and say that the way in which that organisation has been constituted means that it is toothless. We need to look at that. The Garda putting out statements to undermine it, bad and all as it is, is not good enough.

The former Minister failed in his statutory duty and diminished and downplayed these concerns and left us with an appalling mess which, unfortunately, the Minister has to clean up. I know the other Deputies congratulated her and I wish her well but I was nearly going to commiserate with her given the scale of the task. The Taoiseach has reinvented himself as being a champion of these issues. There is a long list of correspondence from Sergeant Maurice McCabe with the Taoiseach on these issues but he did not want to know. In fairness, Deputy Wallace said before that his support for the Minister would go from 100% to 0% overnight and that is, in essence, what happened. The Tánaiste has been gormlessly wandering around, seemingly oblivious to all of what is going on. The Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality is hearing submissions from organisations which have already put them on the public record years ago in terms of what needs to be done.

We need to move on the new police board as soon as possible. We need something bigger than that - a root and branch review, a Patten-style commission on what we want in policing and some form of reconciliation for all of the damaged gardaí and citizens.

See this speech in context