[ speaking in the Seanad on Commission of Investigation (Certain Matters relative to An Garda Síochána and other persons) Order 2014: Motion ….. ]
I warmly welcome the Taoiseach to the House. The assistant commissioner, John O’Mahoney, reassured us there is no question of what has been described as a culture of non-enforcement of penalties being tolerated by the Garda Síochána but we must wonder how it comes to pass that there are now three separate inquiries into the activities of gardaí. How has it come to this? I believe that it is mismanagement. A culture of cover-up has permeated successive national Administrations but I expected more from the Taoiseach and this Administration. Over the past few months, we have seen attempt after attempt on the part of the Government to hide from the reality of the multitude of problems that have emanated from the mismanagement of the powers entrusted in our gardaí. Despite these cover-ups failing time and again, the response to every new fact has been further cover-up.
Considering the very limited scope of the terms of reference for this inquiry, I must ask the following questions. What about the other recording facilities in our Garda stations? Have they ever been misused? Why have they been so deliberately excluded from the terms of reference of this inquiry? When the culture of using electronic surveillance within the prosecutorial service is so strong that the DPP would think to attempt to introduce surreptitiously recorded conversations as evidence in a criminal case, surely it is plausible some others within the service – broadly defined – would have thought to use other recording facilities in the Garda stations in a similar fashion. Would it not be better to exclude them, if they are rightfully to be excluded, from any suggestion that they were abused by investigating whether they had been abused? The alternative is to risk some further future scandal as more information about the practices of a minority of our gardaí leaks into the public domain.
The obfuscation of the truth and the slow emergence of the facts provides an acidic drip, drip, drip of information that is steadily wearing away the genuine and well-deserved high esteem the Irish people have for the Garda Síochána. So many of them have put their health and lives on the line to defend our rights. The Taoiseach, personally, must take some of the blame for this as his is the Government overseeing this and not managing it well. The Taoiseach’s Government has transformed discreditable behaviour on the behalf of a minority of gardaí into what has become a systemic crisis for the force. The Cabinet has overseen this and handled it badly. We expected more of the Taoiseach than this and I expected more.
Ours was a generation that knew the arms crisis, knew the bad old days of Charlie Haughey and the activities of former Minister Seán Doherty – Lord rest him – at their extremes, which saw the bugging of journalists for political gain, and lived through incidents that were grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. Our generation knew the potential for harm to the Republic when a Government, instead of acknowledging uncomfortable facts, instead puts up a hedgehog defence that sees internal critics as traitors and external critics as enemies. What did the Government do? The record so far is to put pressure on the Smithwick tribunal to end its inquiries early, to dismiss the concerns of the whistleblowers and, more reprehensibly, to issue statements made at multiple levels – administrative and political – of the Government to undermine the good names of these whistleblowers.
I publically thank the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Leo Varadkar, who said what needed to be said, who said what should have been said by senior members of the Government many months earlier. He is a credit to the Fine Gael Party, to the Cabinet and to our medical profession. There was the leaking of confidential information about the Deputies who supported the whistleblowers. There was the Taoiseach’s misinterpretation of the Garda Act regarding GSOC. At every opportunity to hide, there has been hiding, at every opportunity to evade, there has been evasion. This is not what the electorate expected of the reforming Government. Those of us who endorsed the Taoiseach, and supported his candidacy for high office, believing that he would be a reforming Taoiseach, did not expect this.
The official version of events that the former Commissioner retired for family reasons only hours after meeting the Taoiseach’s representative, drags this mess into less and less credible territory. It is not credible that the long-recognised practice of improper taping in Garda stations, which Martin Callinan attempted to bring to the attention of others, was the proximate cause for his apparent dismissal. Every time there has been a partial acknowledgement of the reality of the Garda behaviour, some other fact comes into light and there is something else beneath this surface. How does the Taoiseach answer the charge that will be levelled by the Irish people, cynical as they are about politics, that what differentiates any Irish Opposition party from an Irish Government party is merely the opportunity that a particular tribe will have to further the interests most closely associated with it and to damage those who are not loyal members of the tribe? In the remaining two years, I urge the Taoiseach to recapture the zeal of reform that swept him into office, to put the protection of whistleblowers front and centre and to acknowledge that people who disagree with him are not necessarily his enemies but people whose point of view should be esteemed and sometimes acted upon.
