Ms Josephine Feehily:

I certainly share the Deputy's concern about the absence of supervision, which was patently obvious in the O'Higgins report and has been made obvious in a number of other reviews and reports. This is where performance management comes in; if nobody asks a sergeant, an inspector or a supervisor about their performance, the consequence is we are going to end up with very patchy performance.

I mentioned the absence of good technology and there is not a good IT-based incident management which can monitor who picked up the file, metaphorically speaking, what they did with it, when they did it, the time lapses or details of when a file was dropped or not pursued. From the point of view of supervision, there is not an easy way to access those data and that was a surprise to me, given where I came from, where we used technology to monitor how cases moved along. Performance encompasses supervision and we can make that a centrepiece of our examination of the Commissioner. I have advised the Commissioner's team that it needs to build measures into its incident management system so that we can ask the questions about time lapses, throughput and such things.

The Deputy asked about moulding and that is hugely important.. The code of ethics also has a part to play in this area and next year we will set aside time to look under the bonnet of the training programme to see where we can influence it in respect of service and victims. We will look toward the formation of gardaí in the context of policing principles, which are a powerful element of the Act.

Our ambition, as opposed to what is likely to happen in respect of appointments, may require two answers. The ambition of my authority colleagues, which we have communicated to the Department, would be for open recruitment to be moved downward. The Government took a decision to have open recruitment for the top two levels and we would like to bring it down to the next level. This is not reinventing the wheel as it is common in other parts of the public sector. Open recruitment has moved gradually downward and recruitment is now open at all levels. That is our ambition but I am not sure whether the regulations will allow that, at least initially. If they do not, it will be on the list we will prepare by the end of next year, and which I discussed with Deputies Wallace and Clare Daly. The Garda Inspectorate has been asked to look at best practice internationally in respect of opening up recruitment at all levels. I am very encouraged by that and the authority will make a submission to that project.

If recruitment cannot be opened to the public we are at least keen for it to be open at a number of levels, as happens in other sectors, so that ambitious newly-recruited junior gardaí do not have to go through being a sergeant to be an inspector. In the ranks for which we will have responsibility we want to encourage applications from a number of levels at the same time.

However, as to whether that will happen, we are in the hands of the regulations.