Garda Síochána (Powers) Bill 2026: Committee Stage (Resumed) Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10 ============================================================ Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland I take that last point, which was that the media can make what they want of information. People like Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk will put two and two together and get 22 if they want. I appreciate that. However, what I am saying is that in light of the ruling from the Chair on the last occasion, the amendment I have tabled has been specifically altered to make it entirely voluntary and discretionary. There is no compulsion on a Minister to do anything with it. If he does not make any regulations, that is the end of the matter. The annual report does not have to mention anything because there is nothing there to be reported on. There is something here that really does get to me. A decision has been made that we do not want to know. Senator Ruane made a very good point. If people are stopped and searched and found to be in possession of stolen property or whatever, they are arrested and summonsed or whatever. Something happens to them. They are brought to a Garda station and something happens. That is one thing. What is much less known with regard to stop-and-search powers relates to people who are entirely innocent. A group of four may be told to wait and that they will be searched. None of them have a knife or anything else on them. They are just left to stand there when members of Garda Síochána have told them they are to wait because they are going to search them. It is the innocent people who feel the brunt of unfair policing. I am not arguing for the naive view that everybody is entitled to an equal chance not to be detected committing a crime. I am not making that point. I am making a different point, which is that if you give search powers to members of An Garda Síochána and these powers are deployed in a manner that discriminates against minorities, they know it. They know it because their son is stopped and searched more often because he is a black kid than the neighbour who lives next door whose kids are not stopped and searched that often. That is what we are talking about. We do not have to go further than looking at those burned-out houses in Belfast last night, which had nothing to do with anything, to realise how deep the sense of fear and oppression of racial minorities actually is. If you are in a minority and the system seems to stop you more often on the street than anybody else, you have to ask why this is being done if it is not the colour of your skin. Why is it being done? I am going to come back to the Minister of State on another issue. Why does the Department not want to know the information that the British and the Northern Irish collect with a view to working out if the powers given to police in the United Kingdom are being fairly used with regard to minorities? Why would a Department not want to know that? This is wilful ignorance. Nobody wants to know this information because it makes policing more accountable and it ensures that if, in fact, stop and search is being unfairly operated in respect of certain social groups and minorities, nobody can prove it. Nobody in this House can prove it now. Nobody here can say for a fact whether black kids are stopped more often than white kids - nobody can do it - but if you are a black kid in London, you can actually prove it. By the way, when I mentioned Oxford Street, perhaps I should not have done so. In reference to Senator Kelleher's point, it may well be that apparently statistically discriminatory figures would arise from the policing of the Notting Hill Carnival. If you want to find some explanations for anomalies, you will find them. What we are facing here is the Department, in the interests of An Garda Síochána, saying that it does not want this degree of transparency, and that it does not want it to be known that people who have never been in court were stopped more often than was statistically likely because of their membership of an ethnic group or whatever. There was waffle from the Department about the census. How could the census possibly help? We have just had 100 years of census material. How could it possibly help? Perhaps the Central Statistics Office could ask people every year whether they had been stopped. Maybe we could get some of this information that way because it does have an ongoing collection of census data dealing with issues such as how many people in the community have been criminally victimised. As far as I know, the CSO has never collected information on whether people have been stopped and searched by the gardaí in the past year. I do not believe it will ever happen. If it is not going to come from the CSO by means of some kind of survey of that kind - no matter how clever the CSO is in devising surveys and no matter how reliable its figures might be if it did conduct such a survey - we are going to be in the position of being in a submarine without a periscope. We will just not know. We do not know what is happening. We are being asked to take it on trust that gardaí are immune from the unconscious prejudices which have shown up in the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland. I do not accept that we should accept that. --- 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