Mr. Martin Callinan:

No, it is fine. I appreciate the Deputy's offer. I saw some of the figures at the weekend. It related to a particular element of white collar crime, as it is branded. The Central Statistics Office refer to fraud-related crime, which is a much wider bracket. For the year 2010 there is a 51% conviction rate.

Conviction rates are quite tricky. In any year one is just dealing with a snapshot of what is happening in that year. In the wider context of so-called white collar crime, there is much activity ongoing. The advent of electronic business has provided challenges that did not exist heretofore. Certainly, in my younger days in my policing career we did not appear to have those problems and we dealt with cheque fraud, forgeries and so forth. We targeted those and got quite good results. It is still the case that we are well ahead of the curve as a policing service, in the context of other policing agencies, in respect of detections. Convictions are something else. Once we satisfy the threshold for the Director of Public Prosecutions, DPP, or there is sufficient evidence to charge somebody, it is then a matter for the courts. It is a tricky dynamic, and it is tricky to try to discuss convictions at length. However, I can assure the Deputy that white collar crime is very high on our agenda. Without telling tales out of school, it will feature very prominently in our policing plan and our strategy for next year and beyond.