Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Fianna Fáil and particularly Deputy O'Callaghan for tabling this motion. I welcome the opportunity to make a brief contribution on it. We are not talking about the youth diversion programme, which is a brilliant programme. It is not what we are talking about. We are talking about the young people who did not fit into that programme, who committed crimes ranging from public order offences to very serious crimes such as rape and who were not followed up on. In total, there were 7,894 crimes committed by 3,489 children. That is what we are talking about here. We are talking about how it happened, how it was discovered, how long it took and what we are going to do about it. It has already been mentioned that a very brave and public-minded garda raised this issue in the first place and asked for the professional standards unit to come in, which it did. Those inquiries took from October 2015 to June 2017. I do not know how it could have taken that long. It is a question. There was a nationwide probe which took from July 2017 until January 2019 to report. We should have that report before us but we do not.

Our sympathy goes to the victims who suffered and to those victims who did not come forward and give a statement which is the greater number in terms of the crimes that were not prosecuted. Of the children who were ignored and not followed up on, 57 have died. The Policing Authority has rightly expressed sympathy for both the victims and for the children who committed the crimes that were not followed up. It is an indictment of our society. It is only a small subsection of the numbers that have been given out today. We are doing something seriously wrong. How many of the crimes that were not followed up were reported as solved? I understand a substantial number were recorded by the Garda as detected or solved. Am I wrong about that? That is what was reported in the press? It is very worrying in the context of the Charleton tribunal, which we have just completed, and which talked about honesty, visibility, pride and obligations. He listed out the seven obligations on gardaí. There have been various problems with statistics, including on penalty points and breathalysing and domestic violence. In a recent sample on domestic violence statistics, we found the figures were most unreliable. The Central Statistics Office suspended entirely the publication of crime data back in 2017. It has resumed it again but only with caution. It has serious concerns about it. These are the issues that jump out for me with regard to this matter.

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