Jonathan O'Brien (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will follow up on Deputy Clare Daly's final point, which I was going to raise, namely, the Prison Service Vote. We do not measure the outputs. We have very broad statements from the Department, for example, "ensure that drug addiction treatment programmes are available for all prisoners ... willing to participate". We all know there are not enough drug treatment programmes in prisons for those who wish to participate. Such broad statements give us no tangible evidence that they are working. We do not follow up with prisoners when they are released and we do not know how successful these programmes are. Even the Department says there is no dataset in place which provides the necessary information to measure all prisoner reintegration. The recidivism studies published in conjunction with the CSO can be used as a key indicator for reoffending rates. We do not have the outputs and inputs and the data to be able to measure it. While we have broad statements such as a certain number of people engaged in juvenile diversion programmes, we have no data to show the number of people who did not go on to commit crime or who went into education. We need to examine this issue of broad statements.

In 2012 there was a major issue with family law courts and long waiting times. The Department implemented an initiative called the family mediation initiative. We also considered a business and commercial mediation pilot scheme, which was to resolve commercial disputes. The Department is saying it is too early to measure how successful they are. When will we get some feedback on these two initiatives to see how successful they are and whether we are saving money as a result of them?

I will welcome the construction of the new prison in Cork. The facility caters for up to 310 prisoners and more than 250 no longer have to slop out. However, there is a major issue in the local community around the old prison and the future plans for it. I am not up on the Estimates. I presume there is an ongoing cost to having it there, even though it has been closed.

Although we keep hearing we will get a certain number of extra gardaí coming through Templemore and via recruitment, we do not get net figures, and it is the net figures off which we need to work.

Yes, we will have 800 new recruits in 2017 but we also need to see what is the net figure when retirements are taken into account. When we speak about Garda numbers, we should be talking about Garda hours and how the numbers of Garda are being used, how many are on traffic duty, how many are on burglary duty and how many are on drug detection. That would give a more accurate indication of how effective the numbers are and whether we are getting value for money. That may be an operational issue but I am sure it is information that can be provided.

My final question goes back to the CSO report, and yes there are two conflicting reports and it is important that we do not just cherry-pick from one report as opposed to another report. The Minister said in her opening statement that she has spoken to the CSO with regard to the report. Perhaps the Minister will indicate if she has spoken to the Commissioner about the reports. The Minister made a bizarre statement this morning when she said that all crimes have been investigated, even if they have not been recorded. I do not know how we can qualify that statement. How do we know crimes have been investigated if they have not even been recorded? Again, as Deputy Jack Chambers said, we cannot just make statements - we must be able to support them. To state that all crimes are investigated even if they are not recorded is a very broad statement. We still have not received a reason 16% of crimes have not been recorded on PULSE. We do not know why crimes are being reclassified. There may be very legitimate reasons but we have not got that information. As well as speaking to the CSO, has the Minister also spoken to the Garda Commissioner? If she has, maybe she would give the committee some feedback on that conversation.