The Garda Commissioner, Nóirín O'Sullivan, has asked the Minister for Justice to refer allegations that senior officers sought to mislead the inquiry to the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (Gsoc).
The officers are alleged to have issued a false report of a meeting with Garda whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe in 2008.
In a statement issued yesterday morning in advance of a Dáil debate on the O'Higgins inquiry report, the commissioner said she was asking Frances Fitzgerald to refer the issue to Gsoc "in order to resolve any public disquiet, misplaced or otherwise, which may arise, and in the interest of fairness to all involved".
The account of the meeting furnished to the commission – and to Garda management – reportedly suggested Sgt McCabe had admitted that some of his complaints about Garda behaviour had been motivated by malice against a senior officer.
However, this account was contradicted when Sgt McCabe produced a recording of the meeting.
This allegation, which was not dealt with in the report of the O’Higgins commission, will now be investigated by Gsoc.
Elsewhere in the statement, Ms O’Sullivan again denies that she at any time instructed her legal team to attribute malice to Sgt McCabe and also that she sought to impugn the integrity of the whistleblower.
However, the statement implicitly confirms that her lawyers were instructed to attack the credibility and motivation of Sgt McCabe, as suggested by the leaked transcripts.
“Having regard to the nature and seriousness of the allegations, and the duty to assist the commission in its task of establishing the facts and truth,” the commissioner said.
“I cannot see how it would be in any way unreasonable, improper or avoidable to appropriately test and cross- examine the evidence of all persons giving evidence to the commission including Sergeant McCabe.”
The commissioner also complained about the “selective” publication of transcripts of the inquiry’s proceedings.
“By ‘selective’ I mean transcripts of no more than three minutes of what happened at a commission which ran for 34 10-hour days, generating thousands of pages of transcripts.
“This has been accompanied by an unsourced and unverified account of an alleged part of the proceedings.
“Whatever the sources of information or misinformation that has been put into the public domain, the inevitable effect is the risk of public confidence in An Garda Síochána being damaged in a very unfair way,” the commissioner said.
However, she insisted that the Garda accepted the report and she was implementing the recommendations and the lessons from it.
“The O’Higgins commission report presents inescapable lessons for An Garda Síochána, based on our shortcomings in a number of critical areas including our dealings with whistleblowers. We must radically and permanently change that pattern and we will apply the insights and learnings from our recent experiences in developing a Garda whistleblower’s charter,” the commissioner said.
