Ms Josephine Feehily:

On the conflict of interest issue, we are very careful about that.

At our very first meeting, we adopted our own standing orders, governance codes and so on and, and as I said in my remarks, we published them. We had a choice. One could argue that by being the approving body, the act of approving has the same risk. We could get a plan and say that it is good, but the risk applies in any event. Our dilemma was do we allow the Garda to produce a policing plan without any input and then respond by saying we do not like it, send it back with that process taking months. We chose, based on our assessment of last year's plan and on deficiencies we would have seen in terms of measures, to help the Garda to design a plan that might be able to get itself approved by the authority more quickly. I take Deputy Chamber's point and we are careful about it.

We have also done other work, which we want to deepen in future years but there was not the time to do that this year. One of our functions is to establish policing priorities. We would like greater public consultation on that in future years. This year we outlined them at the meeting I held with the JPCs and we got input from the chairs of JPCs, and on our consultation day we got input from civil society groups. We put forward a set of policing priorities that seemed to us to be reasonable. We set out why we chose them and we got input from those two groups. Next year when we will work on a code of ethics, we will engage in deeper public consultation. In a way that keeps us from being captured. We have to consult the Commissioner as well about the priorities but we have to set them. It is a matter of striking a balance. We are very mindful of the point the Deputy made.

On the GSOC report and follow-through on that, one of the items we asked the Commissioner to include in the policing plan for next year, and always, is to advance the recommendations of what we are calling third party reports because the list is rather long. I expect when the Commissioner meets the committee she will identify something of the order of 1,000 recommendations that she is attempting to implement and which have been clustered together into the modernisation plan for advancement. We will certainly be pressing the Commissioner to follow through on recommendations but I have to be honest and say that if we took deal with every one of those 1,000 recommendations we would do nothing else. We want to follow through on the reports from the Garda Inspectorate and GSOC that came out in 2015 and 2016, including one that came out in the past few weeks which contains specific system recommendations, rather than to allow ourselves get bogged down in a morass of dealing with a 1,000 recommendations.

If we can get this framework going with the Garda where we can have a tracking system for recommendations that are current, at least we might stay on top of them. I would like if we could address the other aspects but being honest we have to work on the current ones and see how we get on because the bucket is going to continue to fill. There are other parts of the system making recommendations. The Inspectorate has new work to do. GSOC will have another annual report and so on. We are going to try to keep it current. The Deputy is right in identifying us, we are the follow-through element. That is our job. We have put it explicitly in our strategy. We put it explicitly in the Garda Commissioner's strategy before we approved it that we expect to see follow-through on third party reports.

On the unevenness of deployment, I mentioned in my opening statement that this is one of the places we have to go - the connection between resourcing and deployment. It is not a piece of work we have done yet. I have to be honest with the committee on that. I see a huge opportunity in the programme for Government commitment to increase numbers in order to for us to get under the bonnet of that issue. The Commissioner has been asked by the Tánaiste to develop a workforce plan in conjunction with the authority. I see this as the way into that. Some of the answer to the visibility question and the community policing question is about recruiting civilians. The Inspectorate has put that out in lights. It is about replacing trained, sworn gardaí with civilians where that makes sense in order to make sure that there is a higher proportion of the fully trained gardaí available for duties, whether it relates to drugs crime, community policing and so on.

At our first public meeting we explored the community policing element with Deputy Commissioner John Twomey and he committed to an evaluation of where they stand on community policing and I understand that evaluation is now commencing. When we have a meeting and the Garda group team commit to doing something, we follow up on that. We have followed up on that commitment and they have told us that it is now beginning in a few regions and they will grow it from there. The Deputy can take it that we will be keeping on their case about the evaluation of community policing.