Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

There is a Groundhog Day aspect to this Dáil week. Two Private Members' motions about gardaí and their Commissioner, and then this report from Mr. Justice Fennelly. What connects this report with the other events is the consistent level of official Garda ignorance about what seems to have been happening right under their noses. We discussed yesterday how over 145,000 District Court summonses for road traffic fixed charge offences were wrongly issued at the behest of the Garda and how 14,700 of those cases resulted in convictions and penalties wrongfully imposed, and how each of these cases must now be brought back to court and have its verdict reversed. Then there was simultaneous news that the Garda Síochána was withdrawing its breath test data because it was irreconcilable with data from the Medical Bureau of Road Safety. The scale of that discrepancy is breath-taking. The Garda claimed almost twice as many tests as its memberes could ever have carried out. How or why did this happen? The official line is a vague one, that there is no one single reason. When asked if gardaí had been making up the figures, Assistant Commissioner Michael Finn said, "I don't know. Certainly they weren't recording them correctly." The Garda Commissioner has acknowledged that it "may well be" the case that gardaí deliberately entered false information on to the PULSE system. They have been examining the issue for some time now and they seem to be no clearer, or closer to a credible explanation. That is really hard for anyone to understand. More worryingly, a further review of the classification of incidents by gardaí, including domestic violence incidents, is now under way. Apparently, the AGSI, at its conference, is as baffled as the rest of us. Now this report, and a judge who is baffled as well.

My party believes this state of affairs highlights the chronically dysfunctional state of Garda management. According to the narrative of events accepted by Mr. Justice Fennelly, telecommunications equipment was wrongfully deployed in Garda stations throughout the State simply and solely due to a misunderstanding of the technical jargon by a single chief superintendent back in 1996. There was no policy or rationale for the illegal use of the system. In fact, there was never any policy at all. Furthermore, no one at senior level in the following decades knew that the system was in place, what it was for and how it was being used, even though they negotiated funding and procurement to have it upgraded twice.

Nobody, least of all Garda management, knows what the system was all about and why it was replaced twice. In fact, the report publishes figures showing that news of the system and its use had reached almost 32% of current members of Garda rank, most current and former divisional chief superintendents but just one of 14 former regional assistant commissioners and exactly 0% of the commissioners and deputy commissioners.

I referred earlier to this level of official Garda ignorance, and its consistent application across all the current controversies besetting the force. That is perhaps the benign interpretation. More hard-nosed commentators refer to a culture of omerta, a great corporate silence that descends on the force and its members collectively. I do not know whether any of the current and former gardaí who took part in Mr. Justice Fennelly's voluntary surveys to assess the state of knowledge of all this in Garda ranks, could have told him more than they chose to do. It is, I suppose, in the nature of things that none of us will ever know but it is depressing that so many of our fellow citizens are willing to assume as much, as a matter of course. It is dispiriting that so many seem so unsurprised, and even unconcerned, about what is at a minimum a monumental failure of governance.

In that regard, I have to say I am disappointed that Mr. Justice Fennelly raises his quizzical eyebrow, not just at gardaí and their management but at those in government who reacted so swiftly and decisively when all this was discovered. It is bizarre to categorise as "alarmist" those who were alarmed, as the judge seemed to do in his first report; it seems unfair. I believe their response was not only legitimate, but was the only legitimate response, particularly when one bears in mind Mr. Justice Fennelly's key finding, which was postponed by him until this final report. That key finding is that the installation and operation of this system was not authorised by common law or statute law, that it operated in breach of the Constitution and of constitutional rights, that it breached the European Convention on Human Rights and that it also breached European Union law and the EU Charter. That there was for decades a scheme for surreptitiously recording telephone calls in Garda stations without any official authorisation or legislative underpinning, amounts in anyone's language to a wholesale violation of the law. I repeat that it was quite properly a matter of utmost concern to the previous Government when this was discovered.

It is quite simply bizarre that this system could have been in place for decades under the noses of Garda management. The quite incredible finding is that at operational level the Garda Síochána somehow managed to maintain and operate a legally unsanctioned and unconstitutional recording system unbeknownst to not only the Minister of the day but also its own Commissioner and senior management.

Even taken fully at face value, these findings point to a profound failure of governance, both within the Garda and in the parent Department. The previous Government was quite right to raise concerns, not only about the legality of the system but about its initiation and authorisation, management and use and the level of knowledge about its existence at Garda, departmental and ministerial level. Mr. Justice Fennelly's findings do not set our minds at rest. On the one hand, he finds no evidence of improper use. On the other hand, he seems to conclude that not only was there no improper motive but there was no proper motive either, no thought-out policy or purpose at all.

This whole sorry saga reinforces our conviction in the Labour Party that the systems and structures of Garda management are not fit for purpose and no longer command the confidence of the public or their representatives. More positively, it reinforces our belief that what we need now is an examination of Garda structures and processes that is sufficiently thorough and far-reaching that we can say we have put an end to our fire brigade-style response to successive Garda crises and that we have resolved the issues, if not for good then at least for our political lifetime.

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