The tribunal investigating the Defence Forces’ handling of decades of abuse in the military is significantly narrowing the scope of its evidence gathering after being told it would take years to produce all relevant documents.
The Defence Forces Tribunal was established by legislation last year following allegations of widespread abuse and misconduct in the organisation made by a group of female veterans known as the Women of Honour. There were also allegations about complaints being covered up and victims being penalised.
As part of its inquires, Ms Justice Ann Power, the tribunal’s sole member, ordered the Department of Defence and the Defence Forces to produce large amounts of documentation relating to accusations of abuse and going back to 1983.
In their responses, organisations took issue with the scope of the discovery orders and the time it would take to comply with them.
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In particular, officials took issue with a requirement to hand over files relating to legal cases taken against the State by Defence Forces members for alleged abuse.
A submission to the tribunal on behalf of the Minister for Defence stated that all legal documents created before 2006 exist only in paper form. These comprise an estimate 20,000 files which are stored in thousands of boxes in an external storage facility.
A large proportion of these files likely relate to Army deafness cases. However, each file would have to be individually assessed to determine if it is relevant to the tribunal’s work, the submission stated.
“That any such retrieval and examination process would take an unknown time, likely to be a number of years, and require resources which would be entirely disproportionate to the possibility of discovery of files that are actually relevant to the Terms of Reference,” it stated.
In response, Ms Justice Power said some litigation files are likely to contain material relevant to the inquiry. However, she conceded the volume of work which would be involved in retrieving the files would be “disproportionate”.
As a result, the judge narrowed her order to include only litigation files produced after 2006, limiting the scope of discovery order to an 18 year rather than a 40 year period.
This will also apply to legal files relating to allegations Air Corps personnel were exposed to toxic chemicals, another area under examination by the tribunal.
However, the requirement for the disclosure of internal, non-legal complaint files held by the department and military remain largely the same.
A submission to the tribunal on behalf of the Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces submitted that part of the discovery order is “overly broad, disproportionate and that the searches required to comply with this category of discovery would be unduly burdensome and onerous”.
It argued that meeting these requests would duplicate the work being carried out to meet other parts of the disclosure order and would not be possible by deadline. In response, Ms Justice Power agreed to slightly modify her order.
The Defence Forces also objected to having to hand over documents relating to abuse by Personnel Support Service (PSS), an confidential counselling and advice service available to members.
He said information held by the PSS is “highly confidential” and has no relevance to the tribunal. Ms Justice Power said the material is potentially relevant but agreed to temporarily suspend the disclosure requirement pending further engagement with the PSS.
The military and department also argued the 15 week deadline to handover the documents is insufficient. The Defence Forces requested a 20-week time frame for the first part of the order and a further time frame, to be agreed later for the second part.
Ms Justice Power rejected this request but agreed to extend the Defence Forces' deadline to 22 weeks and the department’s to 15 weeks.
The tribunal is expected to last three years and will begin public hearings later this year.
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