Ms Nóirín O'Sullivan:

I will deal with them, so to speak, back to front. I will deal with the authority issue first and then I may ask my colleague, Assistant Commissioner Eugene Corcoran, to come in on the detail of the GSOC issues, which he has.

We very much welcome that the authority, as I understand will become more involved in the promotion process towards the end of the year. From An Garda Síochána's point of view, that is a very welcome development. My understanding is that the regulations will be enacted and that the authority will be in a position to start the process, it is hoped from some time around the year's end. That is useful.

In that regard, I must also say that even in the current situation, until such time as those arrangements are put in place, we continue to have a number of critical gaps at both Garda and civilian levels, and my colleague, Mr. Nugent, is working with the authority in that regard. However, we very much welcome that the authority will be taking over those appointments and we will support it in whatever way we can to do that.

In terms of GSOC, our objective always is to engage constructively with GSOC and to ensure anything that is required by GSOC is provided in a timely fashion. Without repeating myself, in the 2015 report GSOC itself recognised that in the provision of information required, there is a 93.6% compliance rate, which is a very significant improvement on where it was. There is still home for further improvement. I will let my colleague, Assistant Commissioner Corcoran, talk about the complexities that are involved in the residual 6%, because some of the requests require further supplementary requests and requests can be ongoing outside of the 30 days.

We have no issue whatsoever with compellability but my objective is that at no stage should GSOC have to go to the courts to request compellability in anything. I would absolutely share with Ms Justice Ring the voluntary part in terms of that being where we should be getting to and that being the purpose of the engagement at the various levels. It is also important that this committee understands that structures have been put in place and that it happens at various levels - operational, tactical and strategic - with GSOC to ensure there is the provision of requests and an understanding of what is required. Some of the requests, by their nature, are both complex and difficult to get from the areas that are required because sometimes the data require time to collate and retrieve, but that is something that we are working on.

We made a submission to the Oireachtas committee in 2014 where we very much concurred with the submission made by Ms Justice Mary Ellen Ring to the committee recently, particularly on the issue of informal resolution and the category of service level complaints.

We feel that, as our culture changes, we want to move from a blame to a learning culture and we have articulated that in our plan. We want to allow management to make the interventions required if somebody has a service level issue in terms of behaviour or attitude. That needs to be addressed, whether through training, intervention or whatever. We are very encouraged by Ms Justice Ring's submission in that regard and very much look forward to working with her.

As my colleague, Assistant Commissioner Corcoran, said earlier, we also welcome the review of the legislation. After ten years in operation, its practical application has identified several lessons for us all and it is probably very timely. Assistant Commissioner Corcoran can go into some detail on that.