I call Deputy Broughan.

Deputy Wallace is speaking for us today.

I was asked to take Leaders' Questions a few minutes ago so I was not expecting it. I have no interest in kicking the Taoiseach or the former Tánaiste today. Since 2012, Deputy Clare Daly and I have been trying to highlight the dysfunctional nature of An Garda Síochána and the Department of Justice and Equality. While it is an incredible honour to be in this place and to be put here by the people in one's own area, I also find it incredibly frustrating. It is soul destroying watching the games that are played in here by all sides, not just the Government side. Are we ever going to change how we do things in here? We have lost two Commissioners, two Ministers for Justice and Equality and two Secretaries General. There are whistleblowers today who are as well protected as whistleblowers were six, eight or ten years ago. There is no appetite to protect whistleblowers in this country, regardless of which section they come from.

We have not doubted the dysfunctional nature of the Department of Justice and Equality for a long time. We are members of the Oireachtas Committee on Justice and Equality. There has been recent discussion of the Communications (Retention of Data) Bill 2017. The hair on your head would stand on end from looking at what the Department is at. Digital Rights Ireland has exposed the Department so much and yet the Department is prepared to go down blind alleys with it that will incur huge costs for the State. We listened to the Ombudsman recently reprimand the Department for its handling of the Magdalen redress scheme. It is mad stuff.

I do not know for how much longer the Taoiseach will be in office. I do not know how in God's name he will rebuild the toxic relationship with the boys on this side of the House. I presume we will have an election before Easter. For however long he remains Taoiseach, be it a month, three months or another five years, I wonder whether there is any chance that we will actually look at everything we do in here and start to take an honest approach to issues and not play games all the time. Can these problems be addressed? Is there any appetite for doing things differently? We do not represent the people in here. Last week, during the debate on the Finance Bill, we debated the fact that AIB will not pay corporation tax for 20 years. I would say the majority of people do not even know that. Given that this bank was on its back and dead and the people paid for its recovery, how does this represent the people when it is not what they would want? What is happening with the NAMA inquiry? Will the Department of Finance give the documents to this inquiry or will it behave in a similar manner to the Department of Justice and Equality? Is Mr. Justice John Cooke just carrying out a desktop exercise? I still insist that NAMA has cost this State more than €20 billion but I do not think anyone wants to know. What is happening in NAMA is crazy but I do not see anyone with an appetite for the truth about it to come out. Is anything going to change?

I am as dissatisfied about all of this as the Deputy. He may not believe that but I really am. This is not the way I want to see Parliament or Government operate and these are not the kind of issues on which I want to focus. In particular, I want to focus on the important negotiations regarding Brexit. An important summit is coming up in only two weeks' time and I have been unable to give that any of my attention for the past number of days. I can assure the Deputy that I do not want things to continue in the way they have been going on for the past number of years.

It is three years since I used the word "distinguished" to describe Maurice McCabe in contrast to the words used by the then Commissioner and it is three years since I described the Department of Justice and Equality as not being fit for purpose. As I found out as both a doctor and a politician, diagnosis is a damned sight easier than surgery and the cure. It is not difficult to identify some of the obvious problems that exist in our country and in some deep parts of our State.

Identifying them is one thing, but trying to get a grip on them, trying to find out which allegations are true and which are not, and trying to deal with those fundamental problems is a real struggle. It is bedevilling all of us who have the privilege of holding Executive office.

There are things we have done. We have established the Policing Authority, which is holding the Garda to a new level of accountability. When Josephine Feehily and her group are fully up and running, they will hold the Garda to account in a way that has never been done before. The Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland has been established under Kathleen O'Toole and I look forward to its interim and full recommendations.

We set up a full tribunal, the Charleton tribunal, which can look into all of these matters. I look forward to the tribunal having its hearings. It will report on its first module, the Harrison module, this week or next. Its reports are already coming and I look forward to its reporting on the McCabe module in the new year.

The Toland report on reform of the Department of Justice and Equality is partially implemented. I announced today that we will set up a change management board, with two or three change management experts who will monitor the full implementation of that report. I have ordered today an external inquiry to answer the question as to why these emails were not found sooner and why they were not sent on to the tribunal. If they were found as a result of a trawl that I ordered last week, they should have been found many months ago when they were required under discovery by the tribunal.

The Taoiseach mentioned Josephine Feehily and the Policing Authority. It does the Taoiseach no favours to try to defend poor and weak legislation on policing that has been implemented in the past number of years. In September, when Deputy Jack Chambers asked her at the justice committee if she was happy that the former Commissioner, Nóirín O'Sullivan, was gone, Josephine Feehily said "No". She said she regretted it and that the former Commissioner had been doing great work on reform. That is not true. Josephine Feehily is just as big a part of the problem. The Taoiseach and I will not agree on that, but perhaps the problems are a lot worse than the Taoiseach knows. He cannot be on top of everything. Unless there is a complete clean-out of the Garda hierarchy, things will not change. We will be bringing stuff in here next week or the week after about what is happening today in An Garda Síochána that will frighten the Taoiseach. The hierarchy has to go.

If we are going to take a fresh approach to things, housing should be one of them. The Government can say it is doing this, that and the other, but it is not dealing with the issue. It will not go away. The housing crisis is going to get worse before it gets better because of how the Government is handling it. I would love to sit down with the Taoiseach if he is interested. I know how it works and the Government is not dealing with it in a way that will fix the problem. The Taoiseach probably does not need me to tell him the HSE is a monster that is almost uncontrollable. I do not know how the Government will solve it. The Taoiseach has a lot on his plate.

I would certainly be happy to sit down with the Deputy between now and Christmas and talk to him about housing. I acknowledge it is an area in which the Deputy has much more experience than I do so I would be happy to take him up on that particular offer.

I have no doubt the Deputy can come to the House with all sorts of terrifying allegations about malpractice and misconduct among gardaí. I welcome the Deputy having the opportunity to do that. The difficulty we always have on this side of the House, when one is in an Executive position, is that one has to first establish which allegations are true and which are not. We know from the O'Higgins commission that allegations made by whistleblowers are not always true. We will know that from the outcome of the Charleton tribunal. We cannot operate in government on the basis that every time somebody comes with an allegation that would make the hair on one's neck stand up, it must be true. Equally, we cannot operate on the basis that it is not true. We cannot dismiss serious allegations because so many of them turn out to be true. We always need to have in place some sort of process or system whereby we can take allegations seriously and then try to identify which ones are true, which ones stack up and which ones do not, and act on them from there.