Matt Carthy asks: Why is the GSOC public report withheld?

Thank you Members and guests again for your patience. Hopefully we won't have any more interruptions, although we are running tight on time as a result. No Members indicating for first round, so I might just ask a few questions myself. Just again to thank the Bar and the Law Society and the Penal Reform Trust for being here. It's an absolute privilege to be in a position to facilitate Lucia and Jim here. I think anybody who's heard your witness, Lucia, will know that you're not just speaking as a grieving parent or as somebody who has been desperately and tragically failed by the state, but also somebody who has become an expert in these matters. I think your testimony will be very valuable to the committee when we're preparing our report on this subject, but I know that you and Hannah and Gemma and Amy and Pia have put in a huge amount of work and effort, not only in terms of identifying failings, but also bringing forward solutions. I know you've all been ably assisted by Jim every step of the way. Jim's a very quiet man, but probably the strongest man I've ever met. I want to put that on the record as well in terms of the quiet determination that you've displayed alongside Lucia, who has often been the public voice of Shane since he tragically lost his life in 2011. Lucia, you mentioned the complaints you had made to GSOC. From my understanding, the crux of those complaints actually lay in failings of the bail system. Would that be true to say? Perhaps then you might be able to give us an update, because this was a public interest report that GSOC were instructed by government to carry out. What is the status of your family and, by extension, the general public actually seeing the final public interest report? When Shane was killed, I never knew of GSOC. I didn't know what it meant. Our daughter knew something wasn't quite right, and she made complaints. At that time, you had six months, now it's a year. She lodged her complaints in January 2012. Two years into that, we hadn't heard any conclusion to our complaints to GEMIS. Mr. Alan Shatter, former Minister for Justice, ordered a 1025 under the Gaelic Accord Act 2005 in the public interest. He was ordering a public interest investigation. As I mentioned earlier, this allowed GSOC to widen the scope of their investigation, if they saw fit, beyond the complaints that we had made. That went on for another four years, so it was six years with GSOC investigating this. Then they concluded their investigation and said that there were no criminal charges being brought against the Gardaí, but they were going to look at disciplinary ones regarding minor offences. A year later, they produced another report, a section 97 report. The one that they spent six years looking at, really, that Mr. Shatter ordered, the section 1025, it's a section 101 report that was ordered in the public interest. That has been refused to us. I think it was ordered in the public interest, but they're refusing it on public interest grounds. There are complaints. We invested hugely, not just emotionally, but we got court orders from Belfast and Newry, because this man had, after killing Shane, six weeks after killing Shane, he's jailed at MacGabrie Prison, and yet he's supposed to be signing on three times a week in the local Gardaí station, and I'm saying to the constable in Belfast, no, no, no, you've got somebody else. He can't have had him, because he killed our child six weeks earlier, and he'd be spotted for not signing on at the local Gardaí station. I'm sorry to disappoint him so far, but we had him here. So, we gathered all these court orders, made applications. Jim brought me to Newry, and made an application in Newry Court for these court orders to assist the Gardaí-Chicago Ombudsman Commission in their investigation. We got a large amount of documents. I went to the Cloners Library, where they have all the local newspapers, and I went through the Sydney Film to see various charges where he had stolen, it looked like to feed his heroin habit. At the end of the six weeks, we expected that our complaints would be addressed, which you think lawfully we should have those answers to, but we got a summary version, it's called a 103, and that's just to keep the family updated. It's a few pages where some of the complaints were eight complaints listed, and above that, a sentence or two which didn't answer the questions, answer the complaints. So, we're now at the stage that we have to go to the High Court to seek the Gardaí-Chicago Ombudsman Commission report that was ordered by Mr. Shatter in the public interest. I don't want to talk about any ongoing court case, but in terms of, so GSOC is now FISRU, it has been changed, outside of legal proceedings, because we can't speak to them. In terms of your interactions with FISRU, is it fair to say there is a refusal to provide you with that document? Yes, they've refused, they said it would be up to the court to decide, they're refusing on public interest grounds. So they're refusing on public interest grounds to publish a public interest report? Exactly. I think, sorry Deputy McCarthy, I think in legislation on bail, because a lot of our complaints were about this man breaching bail while he was on bail already, existing bail, so a lot of our complaints are about that, so it might help shape legislation going forward for the committee. I would have thought that was the purpose of seeking the report in the first place. I think you've outlined very eloquently the reasons why you strongly support recommendation of the Staines report in respect of transferring prosecutions and functions from Gardaí to legal professionals, and if I look back at the many debates in the House in respect of your case, which culminated of course in the state apology, or the government apology, which acknowledged that you had been failed, and your family had been failed, and ultimately Shane had been failed by the state. But the thread that has gone through a lot of those dull debates is the suggestion that it's possible that the person who killed Shane was actually an informant, and therefore I think that shaped your view in respect of that particular recommendation. But in terms of the legislation surrounding CISs as you call them, informants, what do you think that legislation should look like? Firstly, it has never been confirmed to us that he was a member of a CIS, that he was a covert human intelligence source. We have asked that from early in the first few months after Shane was killed. But our letter would be sent to GSOC, and they won't give us the report. We do know there's a file on him in the Gardaí National Crime Security and Intelligence Service. We haven't had access to that file either. But I think we need, if we're an anomaly in Europe regarding legislation, and it's been recommended, and I think also Ireland has no law regulating the use of covert human intelligence source, and the lack of a legal framework makes Ireland an anomaly. In Ireland, the management and use of CIS is governed by a Gardaí policy, which neither defies CIS nor provides details about the circumstances in which they can be used. I think it's very worrying we don't have legislation. I'm a retired nurse, so I have no idea about these things. Why have we no legislation on it if it's being used? I think the Gardaí powers is the Surveillance Act 2009. It may be looked at under that, but an internal Gardaí policy isn't independent oversight of a member of CIS. We were criticised this way back in the Morris Tribunal about having legislation, and why are we the only one in Europe? Why are we always on the back foot on these things? We need robust legislation, and I'm sure you as legislators will shape something going forward, but I think we do need that. If it's a thing that we're the only ones in Europe and we're out of step there, we should have legislation on that.