Ms Tara Buckley:

I will answer the question about the forums. The retail forum is chaired by the Minister of State with responsibility for retail in the Department of enterprise. We asked for it to cover retail crime and we asked members of the Garda to come in to make a presentation to it. The issue has come onto the agenda of the retail forum. Its members realise we have a shared goal to try to reduce retail crime and have agreed it is worth putting it on the agenda as a regular item. They have linked up with the Garda on that. We would like to see the Department of Justice involved also. We believe a lot of the frustration, as the committee heard, is about sentencing and what happens when people are convicted of the crime.

The Garda also has a retail forum, which includes good representation from across the retail trade on security and other issues. It gets very good information. That meets intermittently, maybe twice a year. The operation has arisen out of that forum. Work is being done in between on trying to target the issue. People have tick-tacked with members of that group. The Garda also has a national rural safety forum, which includes the IFA and other community groups. Mr. Jennings and I are on that as well. That is a way of addressing safety issues in rural Ireland. The forums are talking to us and we have the opportunity to bring these issues to them.