Professor Donncha O'Connell

Professor Donncha O’Connell told a conference at Maynooth University that legislation underpinning the new office “falls significantly short” of what was recommended by the Commission in 2018 and is not comparable to its UK and Northern Ireland counterparts.

It will only provide a “veneer of independent oversight” due to legislative provisions which allow for the “withholding or redacting of information” and “undermine the independence of the office”, among other issues, he said.

Last week’s conference, organised by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) and the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), reflected on more than five years since the publication of the Commission’s final report.

Professor O’Connell, an established professor of law at the University of Galway, told the conference that the Commission limited its report to “high-level recommendations” for pragmatic reasons, but its members had, in retrospect, “took too much on trust”.

The Commission had been established in a context where An Garda Síochána “faced an existential crisis resulting from a succession of scandals, some of which continued to reverberate while we deliberated”, he reminded attendees.

“If we choose to revise recent policing history or minimise its outworkings we will, assuredly, end up where we were in 2017,” he said.