A new garda whistleblower is said to have "experienced the wrath of senior management", according to Independent TD Mick Wallace.
Speaking on RTÉ's The Week In Politics, the Independents4change TD said: "A junior rank garda, trying to do his job properly, when he was challenging vested interests... he experienced the wrath of senior [garda] management."
The existence of a new garda whistleblower, who has made a protected disclosure, was revealed by deputy Wallace during a sitting of the Oireachtas Justice Committee earlier this week.
Mr Wallace said on the programme: "I still think that we will get a better police force. But we don't have it yet.
"We don't believe that the present hierarchy can deliver it. We still don't think that the Government has taken it seriously enough."
Sinn Féin's Louise O'Reilly said the Government has to do more to ensure there is real reform in both the gardaí and the Department of Justice.
She said: "We need leadership. But that will only come when the political system sends a clear message out that there will be support for that reform... there will be support for people who are whistleblowers - who up to now have been treated disgracefully."
Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed asserted that it was "unfair" for opposition parties to "conflate" the emergence of a new whisteblower, as some indication of an absence of commitment to reform by the Government.
He said: "We are the Government that introduced whisteblower legislation. Why did we do that? Because we wanted a light shone in areas where there had been darkness previously."
Mr Wallace responded by asserting that the protective disclosure system "is not good enough" and that the Garda Ombudsman's office was "designed to fail".
New whistleblower experienced ‘the wrath of senior management’ - I4C’s @wallacemick tells #twip pic.twitter.com/cnxpfkWMVj
— The Week in Politics (@rtetwip) December 10, 2017
