Gardaí wrongly told local authority that child abuse survivor had conviction when applying for housing assistance

The same Garda station was being investigated by Gsoc over the handling of historic child abuse allegations relating to 'Alice' and other members of her family, when the information was sent to the local authority by a sergeant in 2015.

Gardaí wrongly told a local authority that a child abuse survivor had a conviction for driving without insurance when she was applying for housing assistance, it has emerged.

‘Alice’ only found out that inaccurate conviction information had been supplied to the local authority after she submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for documents relating to her application.

The same Garda station was being investigated by Gsoc over the handling of historic child abuse allegations relating to Alice, when the information, which wrongly claimed she had been convicted of having no insurance, was sent to the local authority by a sergeant in 2015.

Speaking to the Irish Examiner, Alice said: “They keep calling it system failures, but when someone like me has been failed so badly by the system, you need to stop calling it system failures because I’m trying to regain my trust in the system. 

This goes above and beyond the system failing me.”

After receiving FOI documents in 2018, which revealed the error, she rang the Garda station in the Midlands/Leinster area. She spoke to the officer listed in the documents and was assured it was a mistake that would be fixed.

However, in 2020, after she wrote to the gardaí asking for action to be taken, the council in question was contacted to make them aware of the wrong information provided.

She also received a written apology for the mistake, hand delivered by a garda superintendent, in 2020.

Alice was told that the garda in question was dealing with a number of similar requests at the time, and mixed up her file with one relating to another person.

Abuse reported

Alice, now an adult, was physically and sexually abused as a child while in the care of the Health Board in the region. She and others reported the abuse to social workers and gardaí on many occasions over a number of decades, but nobody was ever convicted for her abuse, despite the HSE making a settlement with her. 

More recently, Tusla conducted an internal case review into the matter, with the ‘Alice’ report completed in 2020.

Aontú TD Peadar Tóibín said serious questions need to be answered about how gardaí made such a mistake.

“This is a most serious matter, and it warrants an investigation,” he said.

“This situation has all the hallmarks of an improper process. It has echoes of previous Garda scandals and must be fully addressed by the Government.”

The Irish Examiner contacted An Garda Síochána for comment but had not received a response at the time of going to print.