Ms Josephine Feehily:

That is enough to be going on with. The Deputy made a remark about resources. I do not want the committee to think that I am whingeing. We have a decent budget and our own Vote. We just have not had the time to do the recruiting. I am not whingeing about our budget. That might be unusual for a public sector body, but we have a decent budget for this year and are in the middle of negotiating next year's budget. It is simply a question of getting up and running, building systems and recruiting people. If we stopped to do that, we would not get all of the other jobs done.

The performance that I refer to is broad. There is the performance of the organisation. There are various ways and dimensions through which we are looking at that. One of them is the inspectorate report and I will return to that. There was also a commitment about individual performance management, which was very clear in the O'Higgins report. That has not been implemented in the Garda Síochána. We have a function to oversee that. That is what we were talking about in our strategy statement. Over the next three years, we will want to see the deepening of performance beyond a headline set of figures towards a deepening at regional and divisional level down to the individual performance that the O'Higgins report referred to and that the Commissioner intends to implement. We need to understand how deep that is going to be and then oversee the implementation of it. That is not without its tensions for the Commissioner. I am aware of that.

With regard to the most recent inspectorate report entitled Changing Policing in Ireland, the Commissioner has committed to accepting, or accepting with modifications, about 90% of those recommendations. We will produce a piece of work next year and beyond. We will produce quarterly reports on that commitment and we will be sending them to the Tánaiste. The Tánaiste has asked us to do this. We would have done it in any event but might not have sent them to her. We regard this as a very important piece of our work. In a way, that is why I referred to it in the opening statement.

One of the criticisms one hears of the Garda Síochána down the years that I think is reasonable to put on the table is the failure to implement recommendations in other reports, whether it was commissions of inquiry, GSOC inspectorates or even the one from a group chaired by then Senator Maurice Hayes rather a long time ago that has still not been implemented. We are determined to take the most recent one and build a structure in which we will assess quarterly the implementation of those 90% of recommendations that the Commissioner has accepted. I believe Deputy Wallace is right to emphasise that and we are emphasising it as well. It is going to be one of our measures of performance.

There are two dimensions to the promotions. There is the issues of the senior ranks, which I have discussed with Deputy Daly, around which the amount of power the authority has and what we will be able to do depends on the regulations. We have made our submission. We want the regulations to be as facilitating as possible to allow us to have best practice around recruitment. That will probably mean the kinds of practices that might be a bit new the Garda Síochána but would not be new in the context of the Civil Service and the public sector. I am concerned here about having different approaches that are already in use. It is unusual to me to find appointment processes being so specifically regulated in a statutory instrument. Most public bodies have a framework to do with ethics and merit.

However, things like one's practices, the toolkit or how many will be on an interview board all evolve with HR experience. This is a little bit different so we want the regulations to give us as much scope as possible to evolve the processes for the selection of the senior ranks. We also have a function to keep under review general recruitment and appointments below that level and we will follow up on a third-party report produced by the Commission for Public Service Appointments in its capacity as auditor of the appointments made by the Commissioner, namely, those to sergeant and inspector. The commission has published a report with a set of recommendations and we intend to follow up on those as well. We are keen not to duplicate work if another body has done an audit and made findings. We will see what is going to happen with those before we turn over any new stones.

The last comment related to the Commissioner. The oversight accountability framework in the statute is complex but the Commissioner's personal accountability is to the Tánaiste. Our role is about the organisation, the services, the systems and the processes and we are mindful of that. That is not to say we have any reason to complain about the Commissioner. I do not wish this to be misunderstood. I am just trying to answer the Deputy's question directly.