An Oireachtas sub-committee inquiry into the shooting dead of John Carthy at Abbeylara, Co Longford, appeared wrongly to believethe Garda was accountable to the Oireachtas, the Supreme Court was told yesterday.
Mr John Rogers SC, for 36 gardaí who brought a successful High Court challenge to the conduct of the inquiry by the Abbeylara sub-committee, said gardaí were accountable to the Garda Commissioner, not to parliament. No individual citizen was accountable to parliament under the constitutional system, he argued.
He argued that the only task of the sub-committee was to "consider" the Garda Commissioner's report on the Abbeylara incident. There was never devolved on to it a power to make findings of fact or reach defined conclusions.
He was making submissions in the continuing hearing of the State's appeal against the High Court decision upholding the gardaí's challenge to the Abbeylara sub-committee. The sub-committee was established in March 2001 after the joint committee received the Garda Commissioner's report on the fatal shooting of Mr Carthy following a siege at his home in Abbeylara in April 2000.
The focus of the State's appeal is against a declaration by the High Court that there is no inherent power in the Oireachtas to establish committees which may produce findings of fact or expressions of opinion adverse to the good names of citizens who are not members of the Oireachtas.
Earlier yesterday, Mr Alan Shatter TD, of Fine Gael, concluding his individual submissions supporting the appeal, said one of the reasons why the High Court held there was no inherent power in the Oireachtas to conduct such an inquiry as into the Abbeylara incident was the High Court's preference for inquiries conducted under the 1921 Tribunals of Inquiry Act. The High Court regarded tribunals as superior to parliamentary inquiries.
That view was not a sound basis for the High Court to determine the issues and in so approaching the issue, the High Court was entering into the area of policy and violating the principle of the separation of powers, Mr Shatter argued.
The High Court's declaration in this case had emasculated the powers of parliament and undermined the rights of its members, he added. This was a situation where one citizen had lost his life and other citizens were worried for their reputations and good names, Mr Shatter added. The right to one's good name was not superior to the right to life and the Oireachtas was entitled to order an inquiry in circumstances where the right to life was lost.
The appeal continues today before the seven-judge court.