Garda Síochána (Powers) Bill 2026: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10
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Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland

I agree completely with Senator Ruane. Senator Byrne's point would be marvellous if somebody was stopped and searched, found to be clean and walked away. Would it not be great if the whole thing was forgotten in some way and there was no record of that person being stopped and searched? It would be nowhere. It would not exist. Section 13 of what the Government is proposing states:
(1) A member who carries out a search under section 9 or 10 of a person or a vehicle shall, in accordance with this section, make a record of the search.
(2) A record made under subsection (1) shall contain the following information:
(a) where known, the name, address and date of birth of the person or, as the case may be, the driver of the vehicle concerned;
(b) the time and date of the search;
(c) the reason or reasons for the search;
(d) the provision of this Part under which the search was conducted;
(e) the outcome of the search including, where a search results in the seizure of a relevant article or evidence relating to the commission of an offence, the article or evidence concerned.
(3) The person or driver who is the subject of a search referred to in subsection (1) may, at any time, make a request in writing to a superintendent of An Garda Síochána in the Garda Síochána district in which the search was carried out for a copy of the record.
This is mandatory. There will be a permanent record. The fact that anybody was stopped will be there and there is no escaping it. It will be known for all time that Michael McDowell was stopped. He is on PULSE, he was stopped and searched, and nothing was found. That is fine. He was suspected of something but it turned out there was no evidence. That is on the Garda record, but my ethnicity is a secret. The gardaí are blind and do not want to know that. That is the one thing they do not want to know. I would have hoped that the Department would say that if the Minister could bring in regulations to collect ethnic minority information or whatever, he would do it in a sensible way that the Garda could manage and there would be no major problem, but I am now hearing that the Garda does not want that information. Why does it not want that information? It is because the Garda does not want to be accountable by reference to that information. That is the worry here.
I go back to the point of how a person's PPS number could possibly assist. What kid going down Camden Street at 10 o'clock tonight, tomorrow night or the night after that will be in a position to hand over a PPS number? That will not happen. Unless we introduce mandatory ID cards - we have been promised that will never happen and that PPS numbers will never be used for this all over big brother approach - then PPS numbers are utterly irrelevant to all of this. Unless the Government is secretly cooking up the notion that it will put PPS numbers onto PULSE, too, and make them a requirement in future legislation, I do not see that happening. Likewise, census data is of no use. The Central Statistics Office collects that data. Unless it is subject to the 100-year rule, which is very helpful for accountability, and is a CSO survey of a non-census kind, such as criminal victimisation studies, there will be no trace whatsoever of which communities and subsections of the community bear the brunt of policing. That seems to be the deliberate policy of the Government. It does not want to know. It will not even accept an amendment allowing a Minister of the day to say they would like to know this.
Senator Ruane's amendment is more prescriptive and mandatory. For the very purpose of getting this amendment accepted, it was made extremely non-mandatory and discretionary. We now hear that the Garda does not want the discretion to enable itself to know these things. I think there is a lot of explanation due about why it is right for police forces in England and Wales to be subject to this regime, why it is right that the PSNI or the Scottish police should be subject to this, but in the good old Republic of Ireland, where we have a written Constitution that says that everyone is equal before the law, we do not want to know if the law is being applied unequally to individuals. I think that is shameful.

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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