{"id":43307,"date":"2026-07-07T00:23:38","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T04:23:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/2026\/07\/07\/garda-whistleblower-west-settles-case-with-state\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T00:23:38","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T04:23:38","slug":"garda-whistleblower-west-settles-case-with-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/2026\/07\/07\/garda-whistleblower-west-settles-case-with-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Garda whistleblower West settles case with State"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Lois West, the senior Garda analyst who said she was penalised at work for testifying to the Oireachtas on errors in official homicide data nine years ago, has settled her employment rights claims with the State.<\/p>\n

Her lawyers confirmed the position when the case was opened again this morning at the Workplace Relations Commission for what was to be the first of five days of hearings.<\/p>\n

Addressing the hearing at Lansdowne House in Dublin, David Byrnes BL, appearing instructed by Felix McTiernan of Noble Law, said it would not be necessary to continue with the cross-examination of Ms West’s former line manager, Andrew O’Sullivan.<\/p>\n

“The parties have worked very hard together, especially this weekend, and have managed to reach a compromise and settlement of the WRC proceedings, and that now has been agreed in writing between the parties,” he said.<\/p>\n

“It’s obviously a confidential settlement with respect to the terms, my client is obviously happy with that,” he said.<\/p>\n

Counsel for the State, Lorna Lynch BL, who was led by Joseph Dolan of the Chief State Solicitor\u2019s Office, made an objection.<\/p>\n

“Any comment in relation to people being happy, or not happy, it shouldn’t be reported that someone is happy or not happy,” Ms Lynch said.<\/p>\n

“I don\u2019t believe she should be restricted in saying she’s happy with the outcome. We don’t have to spat over that,” Mr Byrnes said.<\/p>\n

He confirmed that statutory complaints under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 and the Safety, Health and Welfare and Work Act 2005 and the Payment of Wages Act 1991 against the Commissioner of An Garda Sioch\u00e1na, the Government of Ireland, and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform could all now be treated as “withdrawn”.<\/p>\n

He said he was instructed to thank the adjudicator, Penelope McGrath. “I know at times it was quite robust,” Mr Byrnes said.<\/p>\n

“Testing,” Ms McGrath said. The adjudicator told the parties she was “absolutely delighted” with to be told the matter was settled.<\/p>\n

“I hope you can walk away from this and get on with your life and career. You\u2019ve been a lovely complainant,” she told Ms West.<\/p>\n

Ms McGrath then excused the witness and closed the matter. <\/p>\n

The WRC in Dublin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hearings at the WRC inquiring into Ms West\u2019s complaints first began over two and a half years ago in December 2023.<\/p>\n

The inquiry effectively collapsed a year later in December 2024 after Ms West’s legal team said she had received an unfair hearing and called for the recusal of the original adjudicator. The case opened afresh before Ms McGrath in November 2025.<\/p>\n

Ms West was joint deputy head of the Garda Siochana Analysis Service (GSAS) at assistant principal grade prior to taking extended sick leave.<\/p>\n

She and a colleague, garda analyst Laura Galligan, went public on the misclassification of homicides in Garda records in testimony to the Oireachtas Justice Committee in March 2018, the tribunal has heard.<\/p>\n

Ms West’s case was that she suffered various detriments at work because she went public on the homicide data, amounting to a years-long continuum of whistleblower penalisation.<\/p>\n

This included what her lawyers said was a failure to impose protective measures when she alleged she was harassed and sexually harassed by a superior; being effectively “demoted” while a colleague at the same grade was promoted, and the withdrawal of sick pay.<\/p>\n

The allegations and statutory complaints were robustly denied by the State.<\/p>\n

‘Boiling point’<\/h3>\n

In 2017, she and Ms Galligan had faced “boiling point” pressure to “sign on the dotted line” and endorse a review of the homicide cases she considered a “whitewash”, she said.<\/p>\n

The tribunal heard there were multiple changes in the leadership and structure of the Garda Sioch\u00e1na Analysis Service in the years which followed.<\/p>\n

Ms West said the level of work required of her after the departure of the original head of GSAS brought her to the point of “burnout” by the time a new GSAS chief, Laurence Scanlan, was appointed in June 2019.<\/p>\n

“He claimed when he’d been in the military to have shot 27 people,” she added. “I was trying to get my work done,” she said.<\/p>\n

Other comments attributed to Mr Scanlan by Ms West included telling her to “find someone who\u2019s got a real hard-on for that kind of stuff” in relation to the assignment of a task.<\/p>\n

“My whole personal space was invaded. I couldn\u2019t get a break from this guy,” she said.<\/p>\n

The tribunal heard she approached Assistant Commissioner Michael O\u2019Sullivan in August that year about Mr Scanlan, and went to him again with another GSAS colleague, Jacintha Dowling, the following month.<\/p>\n

Ms Dowling gave evidence during the original hearings into the case in March 2024, and subsequently passed away.<\/p>\n

“To give a measure of where everyone was at in relation to Mr Scanlan, the staff were actively saying: ‘This guy is really unstable, I can honestly see him taking us hostage in the building and us waving placards out the window to RT\u00c9’,” Ms West said.<\/p>\n

Ms West said she and Ms Dowling had been told by Mr Scanlan that he was “getting through a bottle of bourbon every night” and that she had “the impression he was coming in hung over in a very bad mood”.<\/p>\n

Ms Lynch told the WRC at the time that allegations of harassment and sexual harassment against Mr Scanlan were “unproven allegations” and that it was “extremely important that it be reported that there were no findings in that regard”.<\/p>\n

Ms West had been sharing the job of leading GSAS with another colleague of the same grade, Sarah Parsons, after Mr Scanlan vacated his post in the autumn of 2019.<\/p>\n

As a plan to expand GSAS got underway in late 2020, Ms West learned that Ms Parsons was to be appointed to a new post as GSAS director\u2013 her name having been on a Department of Justice panel for principal officer posts.<\/p>\n

While there was a second principal officer post set to open, that vacancy was opened to external candidates rather than being an interdepartmental competition. Part of Ms West\u2019s case was that this disadvantaged her.<\/p>\n

Ms West went absent on certified sick leave due to stress in December 2020. On the day of her return to work on 1 February 2021, Ms West wrote an email to all staff at GSAS stating that she had been brought to the point of “burnout”.<\/p>\n

Andrew O\u2019Sullivan, who had been appointed chief information officer at the force, told the WRC last year he had “major cause for concern” about the email and raised it with Ms West at an online meeting. It was alleged he told her to “drop” a course of study and told her she “should not be managing her own staff”.<\/p>\n

Mr O’Sullivan said he only pointed out the “huge time commitment” required by the course as Ms West returned to work from stress leave.<\/p>\n

He denied “absolutely” that any of his actions at this time were meant to penalise Ms West. Ms West subsequently returned to sick leave, and remained out.<\/p>\n

“I’d do the same again”<\/h3>\n

Ms West told the WRC a probe was opened in 2016 after Ms 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.<\/p>\n

Ms West said there were 16 cases which were recorded by Garda\u00ed on PULSE as “something other than homicide” which “absolutely needed to be reclassified”, and others with “very glaring data quality issues”.<\/p>\n

“It broadened out. It became about all homicides, and about classification of death more generally. Unfortunately, as time went on, we also had serious concerns about the investigations in some of those cases,” she said.<\/p>\n

“We’d cases languishing as sudden death for years with clear, extensive homicide investigations going on – and other cases where it wasn’t really clear what level of investigation was going on,” she said.<\/p>\n

Meetings of an internal garda review group in the spring of 2017 were “extremely challenging, difficult and robust”, with Ms West telling the WRC she and Ms Galligan were “belittled”, “shouted down” and “told we didn’t know what we were talking about”, Ms West said.<\/p>\n

“It\u2019s still happening, in spite of everything we went through,” Ms West said in 2025<\/p>\n

“Are myself and Ms Galligan the only people who have any ounce of integrity, who actually care about these deceased people; how they met their deaths?” she told a hearing last year.<\/p>\n

She said she was aware of one case where “the investigation was so shoddy that questions can’t be answered; and there’s a family in distress who can’t be given the answers”.<\/p>\n

“I’d do the same again today. Nothing was learned. It’s 2025 and there are families in distress out there because they can’t find out what happened to their loved ones,” she said.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lois West, the senior Garda analyst who said she was penalised at work for testifying to the Oireachtas on errors in official homicide data nine years ago, has settled her employment rights claims with the State. Her lawyers confirmed the position when the case was opened again this morning at the Workplace Relations Commission for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43308,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-news","entry","has-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}