Ms Josephine Feehily:

Please remind me if I miss out on anything. The scheme for the policing plan set out in the Act envisages a linear process. The Commissioner prepares the plan and it comes into us before November and we either approve it or do not approve it. We decided it was not necessarily the most productive way to proceed. The Commissioner and her team readily agreed that we would prepare it in a collaborative way. We already have had a full-day workshop with the Commissioner's team to develop the plan together so that when it comes into us there should be minimal surprises and minimal disagreement on the content. That is not to say that it will happen but that is how we want to work. We want to work collaboratively. It is the Commissioner's plan, the Commissioner sends it to us and the Act requires that we approve it. By definition, we can decide not to approve it but it makes much more sense if we have had all of that discussion before the deadline. That is how we are working it. We will be considering the first text at a meeting of the authority tomorrow. We will give some feedback to the Commissioner and there will be an opportunity for a more refined plan by the time of the deadline. That is how we see that working. The policing plan goes to the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality for her consent and then it gets laid before the Houses as it always has done. That is something the committee might want to think about in terms of suggestions as to how the committee will handle engagement with the policing plan in future.

I completely agree with Senator Conway on the JPCs. My sense of it has been that they are an under-utilised resource and that there is some patchiness. Our function in JPCs is twofold. One is to bring them together from time to time and the other is that we are responsible for providing guidance for JPCs. In turn, JPCs are supposed to send us their annual reports and strategies. Before we had the meeting I could have counted those reports on less than one hand. Once we had the meeting, introduced ourselves and told them that we are here and have a function in the policing world we have started to receive more material from them. I regard it as a very important constituency for us. I did not want the first year to pass without at least bringing them together for conversation. Some of them attended our public consultation day and we will build on that next year. I am not quite sure yet how we will do that but our intention is to build on and deepen our engagement with the JPCs next year.

The strategy statement was probably the least responded to of the various public consultations. There were perhaps 15 or 20 responses. However, the engagement with the code of ethics has been much more extensive. We got quite a lot of submissions. From memory, there were about 30 but as many of them were from groups, they represent a broader range of people. Our public consultation day was over-subscribed. We have statutory consultees we are obliged to consult so in order to make sure we had a balance in the room between the various actors, we had to limit some of the people. We did not limit members of the public but we had to limit some of the people who wanted to attend. If they wanted to send four or five people, we had to tell them they could only have one or two. That was a very successful event in terms of engagement.

The attendance at public meetings is modest but we are webcast. One would expect it to be modest - people will not come into Dublin to go to public meetings in the middle of a working day when they can watch it on YouTube.