Green Party spokesperson for Justice Ciaran Cuffe TD said today that,

“John O’Donoghue told the Dáil on 23 May 2001 that the report Assistant Garda Commissioner Carty drew up was ‘completed and presented to me and, in turn, to the DPP.’”

“But in the Dáil on June 17th of this year John O’Donoghue claimed that in August 2000 the only report that he had received about the Carty investigation was a synopsis by Commissioner Conroy [a report from Deputy Commissioner Conroy [which] constituted a synopsis of the Carty investigation file’].

“What we still do not know is when the Carty report itself or the full investigation file that underpinned the Carty report was received by O’Donoghue or for that matter by Justice Minister Michael McDowell.

“What exactly he knew and when exactly he knew it is most important in the context of evaluating the reasons why O’Donoghue delayed for almost two years before he set up the Morris Tribunal.

“In that time, Minister McDowell is also on record as saying that between August 2000 and January 2002 the State was defending legal cases brought by those involved in allegations that Gardaífrom the Donegal Division had been engaging in criminal activities without being able to provide its lawyers with the Carty report or with the full investigation file that underpins it. It still remains to be explained how the Minister for Justice Equality and Law Reform, as O’Donoghue then was, can justify spending the vast amounts of money spent defending these cases, all the while knowing from Conroy’s synopsis of the Carty investigation and while he apparently was in receipt of the Carty report that these cases were indefensible.”