Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am being very clear that it is completely unacceptable that this situation arose.

That is the first point I would make. We absolutely have to find out the answers to the very question the Deputy is asking. I am disappointed they are not in the public arena already and that I have not got a full report on how it happened from An Garda Síochána but I have not. I do not have the answer to that question. I can speculate, as I have already, as to whether it was casual reporting, whether there were ethical issues involved, whether there was no supervision and whether there was collusion about the figures. We can all speculate about how this happened. The reality is that it did. It is quite extraordinary that there is a discrepancy of 1 million and we absolutely need to get to the bottom of it. That is why we need an independent investigation.

I was asked whether I am suggesting an independent investigation because I think an internal investigation is not enough. Yes, I am saying an internal investigation is not enough because, as a number of Deputies have pointed out, we can see the internal audits were not accurate. Now that the comparison has been done between the Garda figures and the figures from the Medical Bureau of Road Safety, we can see the discrepancies are a minimum of 65% in one area and go up to over 100% in another area. We have to find out why some areas were reporting figures that were over 100% inaccurate.

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