More details about the Gardaí investigation into sexual abuse in the army is needed, Women of Honour has warned.  

Women of Honour member Diane Byrne said the group was not consulted by Gardaí about the investigation into sexual abuse in the Defence Forces.  

Garda Commissioner Drew Harris announced a “national operation” has been set up to receive complaints from serving or retired Defence Force members of rape and sexual assault. 

He has encouraged victims to make official complaints at any Garda station available.  

Commissioner Harris said Gardaí have received 26 complaints so far - some dating back to the 1960s. 

Ms Byrne told Newstalk Breakfast that she welcomes the investigation but thinks “there is a lot of confusion”.  

"No communications"

“This is the first we’re hearing about it,” she said. “We’ve had no communications, no collaboration.” 

Ms Byrne said the Women of Honour welcome what the investigation “seems to be”, but called for more answers on how the investigations will work.  

She said the Defence Forces require a more “widespread” investigation.  

“We need to go through a full public statutory inquiry to get answers to understand who knew what.” 

“Root out whatever went wrong and who caused [it], and then we can start designing and implementing solutions.”

"This is not a new issue” 

This is the first time that Gardaí will do an investigation into sexual abuse in the Irish Army, but Ms Byrne said that this is not the first time there have been complaints.  

“This is not a new issue. We have been speaking about this as Women of Honour publicly for nearly two years now,” she said.  

Commissioner Harris said that the investigation was launched before the review of abuse in the Independent Review Group.  

Ms Byrne said these issues should be resolved as soon as possible.  

She said: “We know there is a great number of people - including ourselves - going through the powers that are available to us to try and get some answers and some justice and it just doesn’t seem to be coming.” 

“And now we’ve got these new measures but with no answers as to what happened before.” 

“We still need answers” 

Ms Byrne said Gardaí need to build trust with anyone who may get in contact about the investigation.

“There is no argument here that there needs to be something done - people need to feel that they can trust what measures are in place.” 

She said Women of Honour cannot recommend reporting to this investigation until more is known.  

“The people have avenues open to them, but we would like to be able to tell them what that means and right now we don’t know,” she said.  

“We would welcome what it sounds like, but we can’t tell people that come to us for support to trust in these measures.”