A Supreme Court judge has held that an Oireachtas subcommittee investigating the fatal shooting at Abbeylara could not use an inherent parliamentary power to make findings of personal culpability against identifiable individuals.
The proceedings arose from an Oireachtas inquiry into the fatal shooting at Abbeylara on 20 April 2000. Garda members and others challenged the subcommittee’s authority and procedures. The Divisional Court upheld key parts of that challenge, and members of the Oireachtas committee appealed.
Mr Justice Geoghegan agreed with the central conclusion that the Houses of the Oireachtas had no inherent power to conduct the type of fact-finding inquiry proposed. He distinguished such an investigation from legitimate parliamentary inquiries conducted for a clear legislative purpose.
He said an Oireachtas committee could gather information to assist legislation and might, in some circumstances, criticise management structures. But that was materially different from determining whether a named or identifiable individual bore personal blame, including potentially making what the public would understand as a finding of unlawful killing.
His reasoning relied on several factors. These included the separation of powers under the Constitution, the historical discredit of parliamentary inquiries before the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921, constitutional protection of a citizen’s good name and the risk or perception of political bias in an Oireachtas inquiry determining individual culpability.
Mr Justice Geoghegan also agreed that directions compelling witnesses to attend were defective because the required written consent of the statutory Compellability Committee did not exist when those directions were issued.
He considered a proposed procedure confining all cross-examinations to a single day to be grossly unfair, although that issue did not require a separate order given his conclusion on jurisdiction.
He would therefore dismiss the appeal, modify the Divisional Court’s declaration so that it applied specifically to the Abbeylara inquiry’s proposed findings of individual culpability, and quash the attendance and document-production directions.