Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I make the point to Senator White in particular, that there are many things which apparently it would be rude and against the thrust of the peace process even to mention, which are never to be investigated in Northern Ireland.

Take the case of the poor girl in Derry who was shot and whose parents were told by the Provisional IRA that it was the British Army who killed her, knowing that was a lie. It maintained that lie for decades. Nobody will ever ask which among the Provisional IRA commanders in Derry and which elected representatives there were party to that gross deception. They will walk clean away from it, they hope, by simply saying now, many years later, they were lying through their teeth all the time. We have to put up with that kind of thing.

I am not going to embed a process of retrospection into this ombudsman process. It is not the function of this process to act as a roving tribunal of inquiry into every cause célèbre of the Garda Síochána over the past 25 years. I could do that, and were I to match the amount of retrospection in which Nuala O'Loan engages, and if the Garda Síochána were to engage in the kind of retrospective operation in which Sir Hugh Orde is now engaged, I could pour massive resources into numerous issues.