Mr. Martin Callinan:

The Deputy is right. There is an issue. If one goes back to the start of this process, the Garda vetting unit grew from a very small cadre of people based here in Dublin in the criminal records office and it happened around the time of decentralisation. The vetting unit was born. Efforts were made to increase numbers, but there were difficulties similar to those in which we now find ourselves. The superintendent in charge of the unit put in place a system whereby organisations, authorised signatories, could verify a list of people. For example, in the teaching profession, authorised signatories provided volumes of people who needed to be vetted such as teachers and career guidance counsellors. The basic criterion was that anyone who had contact with children or vulnerable adults was listed. That was purely a quality control issue and put in place in order that as best we could no one would usurp the system and claim, for example, to be Martin Callinan and ask for a clean bill of health. That system works to a degree with limited resources. As more and more people began to feed into the system and with the introduction of the legislation coming down the line and the need perhaps to share soft intelligence, this is becoming problematic for us. We have managed to secure some resources. I understand the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine-----