Longford shooting report gets 19 replies

Nineteen submissions on the Garda report into the fatal shooting of Longford man Mr John Carthy have been sent to the joint Oireachtas…

Nineteen submissions on the Garda report into the fatal shooting of Longford man Mr John Carthy have been sent to the joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Equality and Women's Rights.

The committee invited those referred to in the report, which was published at the end of October, and other interested parties to make submissions before the end of last month.

Committee chairman Mr Sean Ardagh TD said most of the submissions came from people in the Abbeylara area, where Mr Carthy (27) was shot dead by members of the Garda Emergency Response Unit on April 20th. He was shot four times and the last bullet hit his heart.

Submissions were also made by Garrett Sheehan & Co Solicitors for the Carthy family and by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

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The 112-page Garda report, the result of an internal Garda investigation headed by Chief Supt Adrian Culligan, concluded that the ERU had no alternative but to shoot Mr Carthy when he emerged from his home with a shotgun after a 25-hour siege. Following its publication and an inquest into Mr Carthy's death, there were repeated calls by the Carthy family for a public inquiry into the incident.

Mr Ardagh said no decision had been made yet on how to deal with the submissions. "This is a matter of great public interest and it continues to be so and certainly a matter that we will have to consider very carefully very soon," he said.

The joint Oireachtas committee's agenda for its meetings was full up to Christmas, he confirmed, so it seems unlikely that the submissions will be considered in any detail by the committee until the new year.

The submissions are understood to urge the committee to put guidelines in place to help prevent a similar tragedy.

They deal with many issues surrounding the Garda handling of the siege, including concerns about how the Garda press office handled the standoff; concerns that the Culligan report did not reflect any of Mr Carthy's positive attributes; and concerns about a conflict of evidence at the inquest between ERU members and the State pathologist, Dr John Harbison, over whether Mr Carthy was standing upright or may have been stumbling when he was hit with the fourth and final bullet.