Ms Nóirín O'Sullivan:

It is something that we are very conscious of and, as the Deputy will have heard in my opening submission, one of our key imperatives is having the right people in the right place at the right time. We are very conscious of shifting demographics over the last number of years as a result of the growth of different population centres and people moving out of urban areas to what would have been traditionally more rural areas. Now with the economic recovery we are looking at what that will mean. There are a number of variables that we want to factor in, including crime patterns and trends and emerging patterns and problems that we may not already have identified. The new executive director of human resources and people development and his team are very focused at the moment on developing an allocation model which factors in all of those variables to make sure that we have the people available.

We are looking at developing an allocation model that factors in all the variables. We must ensure that we have the manpower and the Garda vehicles. A significant investment was made in the fleet in recent times that meets the current needs but we must consider our fleet deployment and factor in the requirement for proper Garda vehicles in the future, taking account of the specification, the numbers and where they need to be allocated.