Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Thank you. A section of the letter reads, "I can confirm that An Garda Síochána's legal team was not at any stage instructed to impugn the integrity of Sergeant Maurice McCabe or make a case that he was acting maliciously". There is a bit of a paradox in that if one completely accepts that point - I do not want to second-guess the Garda Commissioner - there are two opposing stories and both of them cannot be right. If this is accepted at face value, one side is being taken. In the absence of other information, that is not the correct action.

It is only natural that people feel suspicious and the whole idea of the report is to start a healing process, find out what went wrong and make recommendations in order it does not happen again. If there is a question of a dispute, how will we get to the heart of the mistrust? That must be nailed and people must be confident that something was not being said on the outside on one hand, that the Commissioner had full confidence in and was very complimentary of Sergeant McCabe, but on the other there was a briefing to a legal team suggesting something other than that. Even if that is corrected later, trust will not be built within communities or the Garda unless we have full explanations and understanding. People need to be able to accept what is being said.

The stated intention is one thing but the questions surrounding the briefing given by the Garda Commissioner's legal team are an essential issue if we are to restore confidence. There is no doubt that Sergeant McCabe was a very wise man to tape that meeting. It is appalling that he had to do it but had he not done so, we may well have ended up with a very different scenario for him. The report finds there were major shortcomings in line with what he indicated. He has done a service in that context.

We have all met people who were subject to crime, particularly violent crime where there was no prosecution. It is only in dealing with them that we realise there is a deep sense of frustration with a crime in itself, with the frustration copperfastened if the crime is not properly prosecuted or a failing in its prosecution. We all have people coming to us about such issues. I have met Lucia O'Farrell a couple of times and the first item on the front page of the report she gave me is a picture of her lovely son, who was murdered. She will spend the rest of her life trying to get justice and she is looking at somebody who was part and parcel of some of the failings in the process, although not in the same district. That is completely unacceptable.

The problem is that this is not the first report we have had and we have seen a series of them. There is some similarity in some of the recommendations of those reports and what we are discussing today. They include investment in modern information technology systems, which was included in the recommendations of the Garda Síochána Inspectorate report. Another recommendation was the development of in-service training programmes. Many of these are just replicated. I have no doubt that some of these are being acted upon on foot of other reports, but how many more reports are required to get to a point where we can have confidence in the process? It is not just about public confidence but confidence within the force. It is having a very obvious and understandable impact on morale.

I work closely with gardaí in my area and there is a pretty good working relationship. In nearly all the occasions I have gone to them, I felt I had a fair hearing when something needed to be looked at. We can consider how gardaí are deployed and supervision but less supervision would be needed in somewhere like Kildare because there is not a fair allocation of resources. We have the lowest ratio of gardaí to population. There are some crimes with a low detection rate, such as road traffic offences and some drug offences, not because they do not exist but because we do not have the gardaí to take a proactive approach in detection. There is a deep unfairness about how resources are allocated. That is an issue regarding supervision and how resources are deployed. Every year we get a policing plan and I contributed a report about how gardaí are deployed in areas where disadvantage has been developing. There has been no catch-up in those areas.

I have sent it to the new Garda authority because the policing plan has been brought in here every year and for the last five years I have compared one policing plan to the next and it is a cut and paste job. There are a few minor changes, but it does not reflect things like crime rates and demographic changes. If it does not reflect them, it is a case of, as an assistant Garda commissioner said to me, what we have we hold, so we never get the kind of changes we need. We only get those changes in a reactive way where there is a big event, like what we are seeing in the north inner city. Then a reactive approach to policing is taken, rather than a proactive approach. It is only when one starts looking at the supports that have been taken out of some of the most disadvantaged communities that one starts looking at the areas in which this kind of major event will erupt. They do not happen to be dominant in places like south Dublin or some of the more rural constituencies; they will happen in areas where there is a degree of social disadvantage. The housing crisis and the mental health crisis have been added to the reduction of support for communities, such as the reduction in youth activation initiatives, the drugs task force funding, the community development programme, CDP, funding, and diversion funding. All of that is about a price being paid, but the price is paid in a reactive way, rather than a proactive way, which would assist in making sure we do not get to a point where there is a crisis and then there must be a response to it. In the same way we saw this happen in Limerick, we are seeing it in the north inner city of Dublin. Until people start realising this and planning to invest in those communities through that kind of programme, we will keep seeing these cycles of crime, and very serious crime at that.

The conclusions of the O'Higgins report are that the commission found problems at many levels within the Garda regarding the issues examined. One of the key findings of the report was the position of the sergeants in charge. Gardaí will always say that is the most important of the ranks. The sergeant is the person who organises and plans the work. In nearly every report that I have seen, that has cropped up as a failing. Some of the reductions in spending on the criminal justice system have been problematic as regards making sure those ranks can be filled. There is a problem in that, for example, there are situations where a sergeant is financially disadvantaged by taking a promotion. They might have to work overtime to make up the difference. That is a failing: we will not fill the ranks with people unless there is a realisation that it will cost us money to put in the kind of supervision that is required to have a functioning force. Discouraging people from taking roles of responsibility is a recipe for disaster, not least because other findings of the report point to systemic failures of supervision and performance management throughout the force. With such serious failures, how can we legitimately expect the Garda to be capable of dealing with the day-to-day crime in communities throughout Ireland, let alone the murder spree in the capital city?

We need to know the optimum numbers of gardaí in the various tiers. We need a proper debate on that in the context of a budget, but we cannot separate that from the kind of funding that would, for example, go into youth programmes and diversion programmes. That has to be the other side of the same discussion. Other than that, it is a question of intervening to make sure we have a more equal society where we do not have areas where there are high levels of deprivation, so that we get to the cause of crime, as well as reacting to it.

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