Ms Josephine Feehily:

I hope I have them in the right order. The dialogue with the Tánaiste and the Department is positive. Literally in the past couple of days the chief executive and the Secretary General have signed a governance document setting out the relationship between the two of us. We will place that on our website today or tomorrow. It provides for formal liaison meetings at official level. I have met the Tánaiste on a few occasions - I am trying to count them now. I am quite satisfied that I have an open door to the Department and the Tánaiste if I want to raise something. I am not conscious of any problem or constraint in that regard that I feel inhibits us.

The legislative scheme is the legislative scheme. The Deputy mentioned its limitations. I tend to see it in a positive way - kind of glass half full. Many of the powers we have require the Minister's consent. Consent is a quite a low bar. It is not approval and it is kind of binary. If the Minister does not consent, she can send it back. In a transparent context I think those bars are fairly low. We certainly have not found them to be a constraint.

The other thing in the Act that is very positive, and this addresses the Deputy's first question, is that, unusually, it requires us to make a report to the Minister after two years about any constraints we have or functions or powers we do not have. Most Acts struggle to get themselves reviewed. In this one we are obliged to report if our powers are strong enough and whether our functions are working. We do not have a choice and we will have to do that by the end of next year. I have given my authority colleagues a direct instruction that they are to keep a jotter. I do not want to start next year trying to work out what we think we need to know. We should be gathering it as we go along.

We have already noted one or two edges on the appointments piece that need a bit of refining. Other than that we have not yet come up against anything that we regard as a problem. I have no doubt that by next year we will have a substantial submission to make to the Tánaiste as we proceed through our work programme. I look forward to that and I see that in a positive way.

The Deputy said that our public meetings lacked teeth. I suppose this in a way comes back to my remarks about a performance framework. To be fair to the Garda, the legislative scheme always expected a policing plan with performance targets. There never was one. There was never anybody asking how many, how much and what it cost. It just did not happen. A more rigorous set of conversations are needed first of all to build a framework. We would like to be getting a monthly report, as the Northern Ireland Policing Board does - a short report, not a tome - from the Commissioner covering performance against targets and what has been happening in policing in the previous weeks. The PSNI Chief Constable does this every month and he publishes it. We are working to have that as a basis.

It is much easier to have teeth in a public meeting when one has a bit of paper against which one can measure. We have to create all that infrastructure first. We are also all learning about how to behave in public. Not all authority members may be as comfortable as Deputies and Senators are at asking questions in a public forum. It is a different kind of oversight from what exists in most other parts of the public sector. I would say it is a work in progress.

I also think we made the mistake in our public meetings of overloading our agendas and we are about to do it again this week, because there is just so much that people want to ask. As a result, coverage versus depth becomes a problem for us. We are very conscious of that.

We have private meetings with the Commissioner and we have a committee system through which there is engagement with the senior team in the Garda. That forms part of the checks and balance the Deputy asked about.

Regarding whistleblowers, rightly or wrongly the authority will claim some credit for getting the policy published because we called for it to be published. We are now in the middle of a formal review of that policy to be completed in the next few weeks. This was at the request of the Tánaiste, but we were doing it anyway for ourselves.

The dilemma on the day of the public meeting, which the Deputy described, was that we got the policy about two hours before the meeting. That did not make it easy to ask the kinds of rigorous questions the Deputy might have expected and we might have asked. We are carrying out a review and we are getting input from a few experts. In a matter of weeks we will produce a draft report on that policy. There is no point in challenging the operation of a policy if the policy itself is not best in class. We will send that to the Commissioner for her observations and we will then publish it. In a couple of weeks we will have a review of the protected disclosures policy to make available.

In response to how we learn about shortcomings, the Deputy would be surprised at how many people write to us. We get letters from victims, civil society groups and members of the Garda Síochána. Information comes to our attention in a variety of ways. We are deepening our engagement not just with joint policing committees, JPCs. Some of the staff of the authority will begin to attend local policing forums accordingly as we have staff to spare. We are very conscious of the need to broaden our sources of input so that it is not bilateral. The Deputy is absolutely right about that. The members of the authority also have deep networks and bring a range of experience. Everybody has some basis for engaging, measuring and understanding how policing works. The members of the authority also have their own networks. We have many inputs and we turn those inputs into themes.

We have a notion for next year, and I ask the committee not to hold me to this if it does not happen immediately. We are thinking of trying to evolve the public meetings into themed meetings where some of the inputs would inform how we would set out our work programme for the year. However, we have not got there yet.

It is fair to say that we are also disappointed about appointments.

That would not be a surprise to the Department, the Tánaiste or the Commissioner. Deputy Daly asked whether we had objected. I will put it the other way around in a positive way, if the Deputy does not mind. At our first meeting, we identified the commencement of the appointments sections as a key piece in terms of that cultural change. We wrote to the Department to that effect. We subsequently had some minuted engagement with officials from the Department about the timing. We gave it contributions on what we might see in the regulations. We have been very active in terms of being ready. At the same time, I have to say that there came a point in the year when the Commissioner's capacity in terms of her senior team was seriously diminished due to retirements and so on. We cannot expect an excellent service from a policing service that simply does not have people in post. There is always a dilemma there. It was not our dilemma, rather it was one between the Commissioner and the Department. I wish to say that we share the committee's interest in commencing those sections and we are ready to begin to hold appointment competitions for the senior ranks as soon as those regulations are made. We also have a function, as I mentioned, in regard to civilians, which has been commenced. We are waiting on submissions from the Commissioner on senior civilian appointments because we already have that function.