GSOC crisis: 'Security swoop fully justified'

An ex-garda ombudsman has said concern over garda knowledge of sensitive GSOC inquiries triggered the move to carry out a surveillance sweep at the commission’s headquarters in Dublin.

Conor Brady — who retired from GSOC at the end of 2011 — said he believed that after meeting the gardaí, members of the current Ombudsman Commission became “increasingly concerned” that gardaí sometimes appeared to know more “than GSOC thought the gardaí should have known”.

He said that GSOC members were trained to be suspicious and that the security sweep was fully justified.

Mr Brady said a lot of “absolute nonsense” had been spoken by the Taoiseach and Justice Minister Alan Shatter when they questioned why the ombudsman, Simon O’Brien, had not reported the security concerns to the minister and the garda commissioner.

Mr Brady said if he was still the ombudsman, he would not have informed Mr Shatter as he and Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan were “joined at the hip”.

Mr Brady said because the surveillance operation was inconclusive, he would have kept his powder dry because “it’s quite possible that if you kept quiet these guys might have come back and been caught a second time.”

He also told RTÉ radio’s Today with Seán O’Rourke that an independent body should now investigate the suspected bugging. He said Mr Shatter could appoint a senior council to get to the bottom of it.

Mr Brady said there had been a gradual attempt by the State to roll back on the ambitions behind the establishment of the independent police watchdog, and recent events had demonstrated the unravelling of a “fundamentally flawed” piece of legislation — the 2005 Garda Act, which established the garda ombudsman.

Mr Brady said it was a good thing the affair was now in the public domain, and while he agreed with the internal leak probe, he noted the gardaí were not entirely blameless considering the amount of high and low level stories that Gardaí regularly leak to the newspapers.

He said if the legislation was not changed — for example giving GSOC full access to the gardaí’s electronic Pulse system — the events of the last few days would happen again.

Mr Brady said the Government either wanted a functioning, effective and independent supervision of the police system or it did not.

His suspicion was that the “powers that be” don’t want it anymore and they might be better off just “wrapping it [GSOC] up.”