Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to address the issue covered in the all-day session of the Committee of Public Accounts yesterday and I want the new Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Charles Flanagan, to come to the House to debate this important issue. It is now a regular occurrence to see the Commissioner of An Garda Síochána appearing before the committees of the Oireachtas, which in itself is a scandal. While I welcome the fact that the head of the police force is available to Members of the Parliament seeking answers on behalf of citizens, those answers have to be forthcoming. Most of the reports in the media this morning about yesterday's hearings stated that there was an increase in the use of management speak and evasive language in response to very direct questions. A colleague of mine went as far as to describe Commissioner O'Sullivan as being a "hostile witness". Anyone looking at the interactions yesterday could only come to that conclusion.

This morning it was commented that up to five years ago a Garda Commissioner's account would be accepted without question. I suppose it is good that people are starting to question these things. They were never questioned and certainly were never questioned under Fianna Fáil. However, it now seems to take hours of committees' time to get answers to the most basic questions. The Comptroller and Auditor General should have been told of the financial irregularities as soon as the Commissioner had suspicions of the wrongdoings in July 2015. Instead she waited more than a year. She is the Accounting Officer for An Garda Síochána and she failed to report financial irregularities. The Commissioner should have admitted that error yesterday. Instead the issue remains unresolved due to her evasive answer in which she described her decision not to inform the Comptroller and Auditor General as reflecting her mindset at the time. Come on. Some of the language being used by the Commissioner is absolutely an insult to the intelligence of the people of this country.

We are facing into the start of the public hearings of the Charleton inquiry shortly. The public and politicians have lost confidence in Commissioner O'Sullivan already. More revelations and contradictions in evidence can only lead to what most people accept as the inevitable, namely, the Commissioner needs to go. The new Taoiseach now has an opportunity to sort out this mess by dismissing the Commissioner so that we can get to the truth of this matter. It cannot be likened to other situations. We have been calling for this for months because we knew how it was going to pan out. How many more days will we wait? How many more sessions, where the menu of the day is fudge, will we wait? To every direct question that is asked of the Minister, we get a fudge of answers. This is an absolute nonsense that must stop and the only way it can stop is for the Commissioner to go at this point.