Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The area of national security is a complex one for us and it is complicated by how we do things. It is not the norm that the one authority looks after policing and State security, which we have here. It might be argued that given the size of the country it should be so. However, while it will not happen overnight, the idea of a separate authority looking after policing and State security makes sense in the long term. Clearly, there has been a tendency for governments to hide behind national security.

An extra challenge is that our police force is not susceptible to freedom of information. If we compare Ireland to the rest of Europe and most Western countries, we have some of the weakest access to information about how our police force works. To take our neighbours in England as an example, things are more transparent there. We have been looking at cases where investigations of gardaí went to the DPP but we do not know what happened since then because the office of the DPP acts as a secret society. The English equivalent prints on its website the result of its investigations into police officers, as we know because we checked this up today and found reports published on the Internet. We do not do things in a very transparent and accountable way here, which is part of our problem. If we had access to more information, and if the Garda was susceptible to freedom of information, many of our worries would not be as strong as they are.

From the time we started looking into the problems with policing in Ireland, the problem of this area being over-politicised has run through every vein. I made the point on Leaders' Questions last week that in Conor Brady's book, which deals with the period from the early 1950s to the present, the common theme running through it is that one of the reasons we still have problems with how we do policing is that we have refused to de-politicise it.

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