Garda whistleblower Lois West has said she felt like “a severed limb” who had just been “cut off” by her superiors after she raised her head “above the parapets” and testified to the Oireachtas about errors in homicide data.
“They never wanted me back, I was too honest, I had too much integrity,” West told the Workplace Relations Commission on Thursday. She spoke about the “undermining, belittling and bullying” she suffered after she and a colleague, Garda analyst Laura Galligan, went public on the misclassification of homicides in Garda records in testimony to the Oireachtas Committee on Justice in March 2018.
West is pursuing complaints under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014, the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 and the Payment of Wages Act, 1991 against the Commissioner of An Garda Síochána, the Government, and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform.
West was joint deputy head of the Garda Síochána Analysis Service (GSAS) at assistant principal grade before taking extended sick leave.
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At the beginning of her case last November, the complainant said an investigation was opened in 2016 after Galligan began to compare records on the Garda Pulse database dating from 2013 to 2015 to the records of the Chief State Pathologist, having been asked to provide data on domestic homicides.
Ms West said there were 16 cases which were recorded by gardaí on Pulse as “something other than homicide” which “absolutely needed to be reclassified”, and others with “very glaring data-quality issues”.
A barrister acting for West said she has been subject to a “stream of penalisation” ever since she and Galligan first raised concerns about homicides being “misclassified” by the force.
At the resumed hearing of her case on Thursday, West said there had been plans to expand the GSAS to meet the needs of An Garda Síochána. She said that she understood that the top position in the GSAS would be subject to advertisement and competition, but this did not happen.
“There were conversations and discussions ongoing that I wasn’t privy to, even though I was part of the management team,” she said, adding that it was a surprise to her when she learned that her colleague, Sarah Parsons, who was joint deputy head of GSAS with Ms West, was going to be put into the role of principal officer.
“It had a terrible, detrimental effect on me, as my worst fears were being realised that I was being written out. There were active attempts to prevent me from moving forward in my career,” she said, adding that she became very emotional and “broke down”.
Ms West said that after she made her disclosures about the misclassification of homicides, she was subjected to “undermining, belittling and bullying”. She said that she went back to work and “struggled on”, before her face broke out in “a very severe case of perioral dermatitis”.
“I realised if I keep going the way I am going, I am not going to survive this,” West said, explaining that she was on antibiotics for three months and had to go to her GP as her mouth was so ulcerated she couldn’t swallow due to extreme pain.
“This only started after I raised my head above the parapets about the homicides,” she said.
Ms West said that in December 2020, she went out on sick leave as she was under “tremendous pressure in the workplace and not fit to be there”. She said she visited her GP and remains under the care of a psychiatrist.
She told the hearing that she heard “absolutely nothing” from her employer about getting back to work and she had not received sick pay. She said that her pay status has been “zero since September 2022” and she has no income.
Ms West said she tried to return to work in February 2021, but after one day back at work, she was “in emotional distress” and spent 12 hours crying.
She went on to say: “They never wanted me back, I was too honest, I had too much integrity.”
She said she signed off from work again on February 2nd, 2021, meaning she was back at work for just one day.
The case is continuing on Friday before adjudication officer Penelope McGrath.
