Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I want to come back to what Deputy Gino Kenny said at the outset about the Minister's accusation that he and others jumped on some kind of a bandwagon and that the accusations of a whitewash etc. should be withdrawn. I was not here for his statement but I note he is asking Deputies McDonald, Ó Laoghaire, Gino Kenny, McGrath and other Deputies to withdraw their statements. It has been a peculiar day because the Taoiseach asked us earlier not to ask questions about inquiries that are taking a long time and with which Members in this House are not happy. The Minister is now criticising Deputies for making a criticism of a very important oversight body looking into the so-called guardians of the peace in this country.

It has not come out of the blue that people are critical of GSOC. He does not talk about himself but Deputy Gino Kenny was complaint No. 1 to GSOC when it opened. I queued with him outside the building on Abbey Street. His complaint was about the behaviour of gardaí in Bellanaboy when four of them picked him up and threw him over Bellanaboy bridge down a 30 ft drop. It was captured by an RTÉ cameraman. We gave GSOC the DVD. We still have it. We will probably put it out on social media again to show what we mean. Having waited a very long time, GSOC came back and said the gardaí have no case to answer.

At some point this State will have to examine seriously the record of GSOC and the numbers of cases where it has said that gardaí have no case to answer. I understand why the Minister, as Minister for Justice and Equality, tried to defend this report from GSOC and its reputation, but in doing so he should appreciate the concerns raised for legitimate reasons by other legitimately elected Deputies in this House. I ask him to withdraw his remarks about jumping on bandwagons and the behaviour of Deputies being inappropriate.

I want to return to an issue I spoke about when we last discussed this matter. It is about the way the catastrophic failures of gardaí from the same division were glossed over in the report from GSOC as if they did not really happen. The other aspect that needs to be investigated, and it is something the family and any sensible Member in the House wants examined, is that the Garda was not the only agency that failed in this case. It was also the Director of Public Prosecutions' office, the prosecution services and others. For example, every time the family asked why the investigation was taking so long, and many of us here represented them on the floor of the Dáil over recent years, they were told repeatedly that it was with GSOC. GSOC was also told that the independent review mechanism looked at the case and found there was no case to answer. The independent review mechanism did not look at the case because they said it was with GSOC so there was no need to look at it. There are quite a number of questions to be answered in terms of all the agencies involved, and it is fair that the family is asking for that.

Our original amendment to the motion that we submitted this morning stated: "To insert the following after “orders made on persons previously convicted of offences": any enquiry should extend into an investigation of how the case was prosecuted and the process to determine the case; any enquiry should extend to the courts, probation services and other agencies of the state. Errors and failings are spread across several agencies and cannot be dealt with satisfactorily by any established procedure that is designed to focus only on one agency, that is, the Garda Síochána; and any enquiry should be held in public to restore confidence in the Department of Justice and to ensure in the public interest they should be investigated thoroughly, comprehensively and transparently." Interestingly, after much debate with the Bills Office, our amendment was ruled out of order and reduced to what can be seen on the supplementary Order Paper, which states:

To insert the following after “orders made on persons previously convicted of offences.”:- ensure that any inquiry should extend to the information-sharing systems between the Gardaí, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the courts;

- ensure that any inquiry should extend to the information-sharing systems within the judicial system; and

- ensure that any inquiry should be held in public to restore [public] confidence.

It is clear the Department is taking a careful monitoring approach to make sure that no agency is insulted or compromised in this regard. We are not accusing the DPP or the prosecution services of any wrongdoing but we are asking that the processes by which they reached their conclusions and intervened in the case should be investigated. What were those processes? Why did they go wrong, and why are there such grave question marks over the entire prosecution case around the killer of Shane O'Farrell? That is the very least the family deserve and we would be doing justice to the State and the system of justice to investigate the processes thoroughly from beginning to end. If we fail to do that, it is a whitewash. It is being glossed over and ignored. I understand the sensitivities in terms of the reason the Minister should look to protect and endorse the systems around his Department, but sometimes people get it wrong, systems fail and they are inadequate. That could be a series of incidents that are coincidental. I doubt that but it warrants investigation and we owe that to the family.

Whatever the Opposition does with the various amendments, I hope we have a unified approach and that the very least we get out of this is an open public inquiry into the events that led to the killing of Shane O'Farrell.

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