Garda whistleblower Lois West has said she felt like “a severed limb” who had just been “cut off” by her superiors after she raised her head “above the parapets” and testified to the Oireachtas about errors in homicide data.

“They never wanted me back, I was too honest, I had too much integrity,” West told the Workplace Relations Commission on Thursday. She spoke about the “undermining, belittling and bullying” she suffered after she and a colleague, Garda analyst Laura Galligan, went public on the misclassification of homicides in Garda records in testimony to the Oireachtas Committee on Justice in March 2018.

West is pursuing complaints under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014, the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 and the Payment of Wages Act, 1991 against the Commissioner of An Garda Síochána, the Government, and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform.

West was joint deputy head of the Garda Síochána Analysis Service (GSAS) at assistant principal grade before taking extended sick leave.

At the beginning of her case last November, the complainant said an investigation was opened in 2016 after Galligan began to compare records on the Garda Pulse database dating from 2013 to 2015 to the records of the Chief State Pathologist, having been asked to provide data on domestic homicides.

Ms West said there were 16 cases which were recorded by gardaí on Pulse as “something other than homicide” which “absolutely needed to be reclassified”, and others with “very...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMi1gFBVV95cUxPVm5mNXFNajBqbDJMaXRmY0di...