Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

To be honest, I am a little gobsmacked by some of the comments of the Minister. I refer to the idea that this House would be accused of implementing ad hocmeasures and slow in dealing with these issues, as if this was the first time we had heard about them. If anything, people outside the House have been accusing us of not acting swiftly and comprehensively enough. We already have a plethora of reports the recommendations of which have not been implemented. Therefore, it is a little ironic that we need to wait for the report of a commission on policing, a commission from which members have resigned because they believe the Government has not given it sufficient backing, when we have some excellent organisations in place that have demanded for themselves precisely some of the powers proposed in Deputy Jim O'Callaghan's Bill. What it comes from is not a fragmented and unco-ordinated approach but actually a very thorough and detailed public scrutiny and engagement with the existing oversight bodies in order to hear from them what the limitations and problems were for them in performing their policing oversight role. A number of the measures come directly from it. A criticism - I have a few - is that the legislation does not go far enough and take on board enough of the points made during the discussions.

Let me quote Mr. Patten who oversaw the reform of policing in Northern Ireland. The Patten report presents an illustrative backdrop to the circumstances in this state:

5.2In a democracy, policing, in order to be effective, must be based on consent across the community. The community recognizes the legitimacy of the policing task, confers authority on police personnel in carrying out their role in policing and actively supports them. Consent is not unconditional, but depends on proper accountability, and the police should be accountable in two senses - the "subordinate or obedient" sense and the "explanatory and cooperative" sense.

5.3In the subordinate sense, police are employed by the community to provide a service and the community should have the means to ensure that it gets the service it needs and that its money is spent wisely. Police are also subordinate to the law, just as other citizens are subordinate to the law, and there should be robust arrangements to ensure that this is so, and seen to be so. In the explanatory and cooperative sense, public and police must communicate with each other and work in partnership, both to maintain trust between them and to ensure effective policing, because policing is not a task for the police alone.

This very much sums up the challenges facing us in this state. We do not need a commission on policing to tell us that. We have seen with our own eyes the consequences of our not having the aforementioned arrangement in the midst of the deep cultural problems in An Garda Síochána. We had the very real benefit of the very detailed and comprehensive work undertaken on behalf of the State by the Garda Inspectorate which in its reports has referred to many measures which, if implemented, would serve as a beneficial tool in transforming policing. Therefore, we do not need to reinvent the wheel in that regard.

In the first instance I wish to deal with the Policing Authority. It is a little ironic that Fianna Fáil is bringing forward some of these measures now when it previously opposed legislation brought forward by Deputy Mick Wallace that actually included some of these provisions to empower the Policing Authority more than provided for in the Government's legislation. It is worth pointing out that there is a Bill from the last Dáil that got stuck on Second Stage.That Bill, a Garda authority Bill, was drafted by Deputy Mick Wallace. It would give much more far-reaching powers to the Policing Authority than the legislation before us. While we could be doing more to reform the Policing Authority, I welcome the measures proposed by Deputy Jim O'Callaghan in his Bill. As was said in the oversight discussions at the justice committee, the authority has very few hard, independent powers or sanctions under current legislation that could be imposed to compel compliance and co-operation. Seemingly, it has no function at all when it comes to discipline.

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That is a deficit in the Bill. The Bill does not propose to give power to compel compliance and co-operation, which is unfortunate because, for example, we know about the long delay in clarification by the former Commissioner of unreliable and incorrectly reclassified homicide statistics and delays in providing information on breath tests and fixed charge notices among other issues. I welcome the fact that the Bill deals to a degree with discipline, giving the Policing Authority the power to establish policies and procedures for An Garda Síochána which would be binding on all members, and the ability to dismiss a member of any rank. That is necessary. However, it is one thing to give the Policing Authority powers; the issue is whether it will use them. The Policing Authority had the power under section 11 of the Act to recommend to the Government that the Garda Commissioner would be removed before she jumped ship and it chose not to use that power. When the members of the Policing Authority were asked by the justice committee in September whether they had given consideration to exercising the power the authority had as the scandals around the Commissioner developed and got deeper and caused so much damage, the reply was that they had a conversation about whether they knew what the section meant. That was an incredible response for a body charged with oversight of the police force.

I welcome the proposal in the Bill that the Garda Commissioner must keep the Policing Authority fully informed of any matters which have required an internal review, audit or examination of the functions of An Garda Síochána. Presumably, that would cover something like the internal review of breath test figures carried out by the Garda in 2015. If that arrangement had been in place then, who is to say that the process of getting information out of the Garda might have been expedited much more quickly than it was. Let us look at the Crowe Howarth report commissioned by the Policing Authority into breath tests and overseeing the Garda's own internal report. I found it incredible that practically all of the recommendations were to implement what the Garda Inspectorate said in 2014. I do not know what was paid for the report. We are back again to reports we already have so let us implement them. We have had report after report telling us to do what the Garda Inspectorate said. What is even worse is that one of the key recommendations of that report was that a working group should be set up under the Department of Justice and Equality, the Garda Síochána and other bodies to review fixed-charge notices and to deal with the broad range of changes that should be implemented in that regard.

When Assistant Commissioner Michael O'Sullivan carried out the internal review on the breath tests, his report to the justice committee was that the recommendation of the Garda Inspectorate report had not been implemented, yet in the Policing Authority report we heard that it had been up and running. Acting Commissioner Ó Cualáin and his hierarchy team said at the justice committee that the recommendation of the Policing Authority that a working group would be set up had not happened and then we heard that not only had it happened, but 22 of the 37 recommendations had been implemented. I found it incredible that the acting Garda Commissioner and his team did not know that or the people reviewing the situation internally.

The Policing Authority as currently constituted was hand-picked by the Government and there was not a proper selection process. The way in which that process was handled was deficient. I very much welcome the points in the Bill about implementing the Garda Inspectorate report. The request to go into stations unannounced came from the Garda Inspectorate. It has the unanimous backing of all groups on the justice committee. We think that is very much overdue.

It is somewhat regrettable that we do not have all of the accepted changes that are necessary in terms of GSOC. When GSOC came before us, it asked for substantial changes in law to allow it to do the job that it was set up to do, namely, holding gardaí against whom there are complaints to account. GSOC highlighted a whole number of areas of legislative deficiencies which in fact the previous Minister, Deputy Fitzgerald, also agreed were deficient. It is unfortunate that there are not any proposals to do that in this Bill but I hope that is something we could address on Committee Stage. I very much welcome the proposals that are there and I am sorry there are not a few more.

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