Lack of Garda co-operation with inquiries unacceptable, says Ombudsman

The Garda watchdog has described as “unacceptable” the force’s refusal to pass on information to aid its investigations, and has complained about the length of time the Garda Commissioner is taking to respond to its concerns.

In a strongly-worded criticism, the Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) accused the force of routinely frustrating investigations on the "erroneous" grounds that the information it was seeking was not relevant.

“We don’t think it’s right we should be discussing issues of relevance… We should be able to lead our inquiry as we see fit,” the commission’s chairman Simon O’Brien said at a press conference today to launch its annual report

Separately, the commission said it had no power to investigate Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan over his referring of confidential information relating to Independent TD Mick Wallace to the Minister for Justice.

Questioned about the matter at the launch, Mr O’Brien said it had yet to receive any complaint about the matter but was following the public debate about Alan Shatter’s release of the information into the public domain.

He noted, however, if there was a complaint against the commissioner it could not act as “he is not available to our process” of investigation.

Mr O’Brien added it had yet to receive a formal response from Mr Callinan to its request for access to the Pulse database, and said it was disappointed target dates for resolving other issues of access had pushed into the future.

The commission said delays were now routine, denying justice to the people involved, adding it had to wait 542 days for one piece of information. Protocols state the force must hand over documents to the watchdog within 30 days, it pointed out.

On some occasions the Garda declined to operate the agreed protocol and sought to create conditionality around GSOC’s access to information. “We consider this situation unacceptable,” the report says.

In 2012, the commission received 2,089 complaints, relating to 5,449 allegations. Some 34 per cent related to abuse of authority, 27 per cent to neglect of duty, 12 per cent discourtesy and 11 per cent to non-fatal offences against the person.

Responding, the Garda Commissioner stressed the “valuable role” the commission played in protecting the Garda’s trusted reputation.

Regarding delays in finalising investigations, the commissioner said in as statment he acknowledged the agreed time limit of 12 weeks in protocols but said both the Garda and GSOC “have accepted it is usually not possible to adhere to this timeline.

“In the review of the protocols between both agencies it is intended that this time limit be extended to a more realistic 16 weeks in respect of unsupervised investigations and 24 weeks in the case of supervised investigations.”

The commissioner continued: “It must be accepted that there have been delays on behalf of An Garda Siochana in respect of some such requests for information” and in order to remedy this he had established a new process last year.

All requests for information were now made through a dedicated office under the control of Assistant Commissioner Human Resource Management, and with effect from September, 2012 a dedicated email complaints system became fully operational.

“This is a significant investment of resources by the commissioner at a time when numbers of personnel are reducing,” the statement read.

The commissioner pointed out that a typical complaint investigation took 78 hours and cost the Garda approximately €2,200 per investigation.

For 600 investigations carried out by the Garda for GSOC in 2012, this represented a total cost of €1.32m to the force.