Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The then Minister, Deputy Fitzgerald, was in charge of the "dysfunctional" Department of Justice and Equality, as the Taoiseach called it. The Charleton tribunal had asked everyone to provide full documentation to it, but subsequently the Department had to provide multiple boxes of newly discovered information. Nothing in the report published this week points to a vindication in relation to a charge of failing to account fully and accurately to the Dáil. We all have a certain responsibility here. As Members of the Dáil, we each have a responsibility in that regard.

Another point directly concerns us as public representatives. Members should be slow to blow our own trumpets but I do not think there will be a rush of journalistic commentators or others queueing up to make the point clear. In his report, Mr. Justice Charleton rejects the sworn evidence of two Garda Commissioners and other senior Garda officers. The evidence of the Secretary General of the Department of Justice and Equality is rejected as "improbable". The evidence of Tusla staff is described as "wholly unconvincing". The tribunal listed six cases where journalists flatly contradicted each other in evidence, although Mr. Justice Charleton had to decide the truth in only two of those cases. In fact, there is only one class of witness whose evidence on all matters of serious contention was accepted by the tribunal. That class consists of the Members of the Dáil who gave evidence. On all the factual issues about which they gave evidence the tribunal accepted what was said. The class includes Deputy Frances Fitzgerald but also Deputies Micheál Martin, John McGuinness, John Deasy, Mick Wallace, Clare Daly, the former Deputy, Pat Rabbitte, and my party leader, Deputy Brendan Howlin.

The report contains a final chapter of recommendations. We need to return to them and consider them in detail, perhaps in committee. The tribunal outcome points above all to the importance of this House and its Members as a means of securing accountability from Government and agencies of the State. It demonstrates the importance of persistence, refusing to accept the official line, listening to outsiders and banging again and again at the closed doors until they open up and let in some light. This was a real exercise in the separation of powers between Dáil and Government. It was an exercise in Deputies using their privileged position to ensure the issue would not go away. They kept advancing it until a formal inquiry became inevitable and necessary. This is how accountability in a mature democracy is meant to work.

The tribunal report demonstrates how much we still have to learn about accountability. Let us consider this passage, for example, from page 112:

From 2016, no one within TUSLA considered owning up to the serious mistakes that had been made. The solicitors’ letter of complaint on Maurice McCabe’s behalf, sent in response to the letter from TUSLA received in January 2016, was an invitation to give a proper explanation of what had happened. Had that happened, had TUSLA senior management sat down and read the file and then forthrightly replied setting out fully the mistakes that they had made, this tribunal of inquiry would most probably have been avoided.

There are shades of CervicalCheck here in the sense of the need for an open disclosure policy, one of setting out fully and forthrightly the mistakes that have been made.

One final aspect that needs highlighting is the impact of what we have learned from Mr. Justice Charleton on our response to the recommendations of the O'Toole Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland. The Maurice McCabe affair demonstrates the importance of external oversight by the Dáil of the Government and its Departments and agencies. We need to improve the capacity for oversight and to make it far more effective, but the same lesson must be learned with regard to An Garda Síochána. For decades my party has called for an external Garda oversight agency. We were determined to break the secretive and damaging relationship between the force and the Department of Justice and Equality. That relationship was vividly demonstrated in the report by the flurry of telephone calls at senior level between the Phoenix Park and St Stephen's Green at times of crisis. These were calls which no one could later remember making or receiving. Their content was immediately forgotten once the line went dead.

My party was determined to secure effective Garda accountability and oversight to an independent external body. We achieved most of what we wanted when the Policing Authority was finally established. That body, under its chairperson, Josephine Feehily, has lived up to most of our expectations, although there are improvements that can be made to the legislation. That is why it is, to use Mr. Justice Charleton's term, so dispiriting to see now a recommendation to disband the Policing Authority as an external body securing oversight and to replace it instead with an in-house board of management. An in-house board will of necessity become ingrained with an in-house policing mentality. If we have learned anything from this tribunal, it is that the Garda Síochána needs far less, not more, of an in-house policing mentality. Members of the force need to be required to demonstrate fully and in public that they live up to the same basic standards of fairness, decency and common sense that bind the rest of us. As Mr. Justice Charleton put it on page 294:

Central to those issues is a mentality problem. Where a problem occurs, strongly self-identifying organisations can have a self-protective tendency. That, regrettably, also describes An Garda Síochána. It is beyond a pity that it took independent inquiries to identify obvious problems with what Maurice McCabe was reporting.

Why on earth would we react to these findings and comments by shunting accountability back inside the force and abolishing outside oversight and scrutiny? If the Government and the Dáil accept that flawed recommendation from the O'Toole commission, then we will show that we have learned nothing from the McCabe affair or the Charleton report. An Garda Síochána needs better structures of management. The number of bodies and agencies that surround it may need to be rationalised, but that must not be at the expense of the important principle - one Mr. Justice Charleton has taught us again - that policing demands accountability. As he put it on page 292:

A police force is an aspect of the entitlement of a sovereign nation to control its citizens through the rule of law. It exercises primary law enforcement. It is entitled to use force and may be armed. Where respect for the truth fades within such an organisation, where structures of command and accountability break down, and where the police do not offer a complete day of work in exchange for being remunerated by the taxpayer, an essential component of a modern country ceases to function properly. Police action may become fitful, inefficient or even dishonest. This helps no one.

This tribunal has been about calling that police force to account. The Morris Tribunal was about the same thing. The commission of investigation conducted by Mr Justice Kevin O’Higgins, which reported to the Minister for Justice and Equality on 25 April 2016, was about the same thing. Central to these inquiries has been the truth.

This is not the time to consider abolishing any body whose function is to demand openness, accountability and the truth.

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