Garda Síochána (Powers) Bill 2026: Committee Stage (Resumed) Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10 ============================================================ Lynn Ruane (IND), University of Dublin In relation to amendment No. 20, maybe the Minister of State does not have access at the moment to the data on the number of strip-searches that happen and the number at which doctors are present. Over many years, there have been only rare occasions on which it has been communicated to me - whether when I am supporting people in court in relation to community work, addiction or whatever it may be, or even from my own experience as a young person encountering the criminal justice system - that a doctor has been present. I am not saying that is the experience across the country or outside certain urban spaces but it is important to hold that data. I do not want to misrepresent anything but I am pretty sure in the case of the strip-searches, one of which was reported to be more invasive, that happened in the wake of the Mothers Against Genocide protest that a doctor was not mentioned. I am open to correction on that. It is extremely invasive and is used even without suspicion that somebody is holding or concealing a weapon. If you have been arrested off the street because of an altercation that has happened, it is extremely difficult when a strip-search is happening off the cuff for somebody to put something inside their cavity so quickly. Stop and search has been used a lot during planned intakes when somebody is being moved from court to prison. I did work recently with men in St. Patrick's Institution and they spoke about how strip-searches and cavity searches were used as form of humiliation on them as boys housed in adult prisons. Aside from when there is reasonable suspicion that somebody has something in their cavity, especially at the level of indecency of a strip-search, some people have had a negative experience over the years, with strip-searches being used not because there was suspicion the person had something hidden in their cavity, but by someone with power as an oppressive tool with particular communities. I speak about this not to vilify the Garda, as such. I want to challenge historical cultures and figure out where restoration can happen. It is also because I do not want communities to spend the next ten, 20, 30 or 40 years mistrusting any authority figure because of a negative experience of something as intimate and degrading as a strip-search. I remember being in a cell in the Garda station as an underage person and being threatened with strip-search. They were never going to strip-search me; they were just threatening it for fun. I do not know why we were taken. It was shoplifting in The Square or something. I speak about these things not only because I know how much they happen, but because that experience still lives inside me where somebody threatened to strip-search me and search my cavities, even though they did not intend to. As a practice, it needs to be minded carefully in terms of how we do that and how that happens. Whether I push amendment No. 20 or not, we need to look at the culture in some spaces of using such practices in a degrading or invasive way. We also need data on the numbers of strip-searches or cavity searches. There is a difference, so we need to differentiate between the full cavity search and the strip-search. How often is a doctor present for those? What threshold has been met to warrant such a search? Is that recorded? Are we mapping that? Are there some communities where it is used more? Why is it used more? How is it used? Who is making that decision? Who has oversight on that? When is a doctor present? Those are questions I have more generally that probably cannot be answered on the spot. It is a sensitive subject for people and not many people speak publicly about their experience of being cavity searched because it is such a traumatising experience. I would also love to know how many cavity searches happen where nothing at all has been found versus where something has been found, to see what is the benefit of actually doing cavity searches, especially if somebody has been arrested and brought to a station because of a situation that has unfolded sporadically on the street. By this I mean that rather than it being a case of gardaí following someone because they knew that person had something within them, there was an altercation, so X, Y and Z happened just because it had become part of normal practice. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-06-10/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:02+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-10