Garda officer failed to act in child abuse case
Children left at risk from suspected paedophile - GSOC report
A GARDA has been disciplined for failing to act on a complaint against a suspected paedophile.
Garda Commissioner Drew Harris yesterday admitted there were both individual and systemic failures in the case, which was uncovered by the Garda Ombudsman.
In a separate case, a garda is being prosecuted for three sexual offences, including rape, following an Ombudsman investigation.
The 2021 report from the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC), published yesterday, stated that a garda was found in breach of discipline for failure to properly investigate allegations of child sexual abuse and failure to communicate with the victim on the progress of the investigation.
The victim first reported allegations of abuse to Greater Manchester Police in England. As the sexual assault was alleged to have occurred in Ireland, Manchester police referred the case to An Garda Síochána.
‘It became apparent that after Greater Manchester Police had
‘Very little action was taken’
sent a comprehensive report to the gardaí there was a protracted period where very little action was taken to conduct an investigation or to deal with the suspected offender, thereby leaving him to remain a risk to children,’ the ombudsman’s report found.
GSOC received a complaint and appointed an investigator, who found that the garda assigned to the case was in breach of discipline ‘for neglect of duty on two counts, and was sanctioned accordingly’.
The Garda press office has not yet responded to a query as to what kind of sanction the garda faced. A spokeswoman for GSOC said she did not have the information to hand about what sanction was imposed but said she would check.
Mr Harris said yesterday that the Garda failures in the case were ‘not good enough’ and steps had been taken to ensure the mistakes would not happen again.
Speaking at a passing-out ceremony at the Garda training college in Templemore, Co. Tipperary, Mr Harris said the garda in the case was guilty of ‘an individual failure’ and has been ‘dealt with’. He said gardaí accepted the Ombudsman’s findings but he did ‘not want to go down into’ an investigation involving an individual garda.
However, he said gardaí had ‘hugely invested’ in equipment and training and assigned large numbers of personnel to deal with child sexual abuse allegations.
He described child abuse online as ‘a growing problem’, which gardaí were countering with specialist training and computer equipment. ‘Every police service in the world is facing the same problem in terms of being almost overwhelmed by the amount of crime there is online,’ he said.
The Ombudsman’s report also noted that last year it sent 21 files to the DPP about gardaí suspected of committing crimes.
The DPP directed the prosecution of 13 charges, including three separate sexual offences allegedly committed by one garda. These included sexual assault, rape and gross indecency. Other DPP cases against gardaí in 2021 include several assaults, one count of failing to stop a vehicle at the scene of a traffic accident, one count of failing to keep a vehicle at or near the scene of a traffic accident and three separate cases of providing false or misleading information.
Justice Minister Helen McEntee said she was not ‘overly concerned’ by a 12% increase in the number of complaints to the Garda Ombudsman. She said it was partly because GSOC had been given more resources and partly because the public were now more aware of how the Ombudsman operates.
Last year, GSOC handled 2,189 cases, containing 3,760 allegations against gardaí. Of those, 61% met the criteria for investigation.
There were 59 referrals to the Ombudsman last year relating to cases where a person was injured or died at or around the time they interacted with a garda.