Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I genuinely found the Taoiseach's answer profoundly worrying. I have taken Leaders' Questions over the last number of years and I know that these notes are prepared by the parent Departments. The Taoiseach's speaking note was prepared by the Department of Justice and Equality. Anybody who read the documents submitted yesterday by Mr. Barrett could not come to the conclusion that this can be reduced to an internal management dispute, a difference of views. Mr. Barrett has no axe to grind. He was brought in as an external person with extraordinary human resource management experience in the private sector. He has taken comprehensive notes. It is not reconcilable that the Commissioner would view this as a chat for a few minutes over a cup of tea. What Mr. Barrett laid out was at a two-hour plus meeting with detailed, fundamentally provocative and difficult allegations about the misuse and misappropriation of funds, allegations of illegality concerning proper accounting mechanisms, which in other circumstances may well have amounted to embezzlement.

I worry desperately, if whoever in the Department of Justice and Equality prepared the Taoiseach's speaking note today had sight of that and reduced the Taoiseach's commentary here to suggest that this is somehow a dispute between two individuals. We have bounced from profoundly disturbing issue to profoundly disturbing issue.

I was going to talk about the Fennelly commission here. Mr. Justice Fennelly's recommendations suggested that common law, statute law and the Constitution all breached the European convention. We have had a hiatus for a while on that. We then moved on to the fact that we had a million breath tests recorded without being carried out, and we have a hiatus for that. There are 14,700 wrongful convictions that still have to be addressed. We still have no explanation for any of this from the management of An Garda Síochána. Now we come onto the next issue. Everything has become compartmentalised. It is sent to some review body, or sent to the Committee of Public Accounts, or sent somewhere, but nobody is ever fundamentally held to account. I ask the Taoiseach personally to sit down and read the full documentation provided to the Committee of Public Accounts. Collectively, as a Dáil, we have to make decisions on future policing in this country.

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