Tánaiste and Minister for Justice Michael McDowell explained that the Gardaí mistook an important Interpol letter about suspects in a child porn case for a circular, according to the Irish Times today.
He admitted that the error may have resulted in the loss of vital evidence, but he went on to defend the Gardaí - because they had admitted their mistake.
Mr McDowell said while human error was to blame, if people “working hard” made mistakes this should not always result in disciplinary action. “They appear to have gotten a letter from Interpol, and [to] have either forgotten the significance of it or else misread it. They took it to be a circular.”
Rumour has it they were extremely busy trying to hunt down a meteorite that had hit a phone line somewhere between Westport and Castlebar.
The Gardaí explained that the message was one of 180 transmisisons they received that day, and that “It is regretted that it was not actioned at the time.”
Don’t you love that language? “it was not actioned “.
You may recognise this tactic from your home life, it allows you to dodge the question of personal responsibility and infer that the object in question is somehow at fault.
For example:
Mother: What happened that plate?
Child: It got broken.
In another article in the Irish Times, the ISPCC were quoted as saying that research shows there is a direct link between individuals accessing child pornography and the direct sexual abuse of a child - a US study was referred to which apparently indicated that 36% of people who access child pornography abuse children.
The seriousness of a failure to act on information of this kind cannot be underestimated. I sincerely hope that the investigation that takes place ensures that information like this cannot be misinterpreted as a circular ever again.
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