Mr. Mark Toland:

It has tended in the past to have working groups that have run sometimes for many years and the outcomes are unclear. Quite often it will pilot something. We have been running a pilot on sex offender management for six years. A positive outcome recently has been the Commissioner's commitment to change the model of policing in existence since the organisation started, to become what we would call a divisional rather than a district model. It will not pilot that. The Commissioner has committed to implementing those without pilots. That is a good way to go forward. If it is the right direction why run a pilot for a long period of time? Sometimes we have given it a lot of recommendations and it needs to prioritise them and decide what the most important one is.

We welcome the Policing Authority. We think it fills a gap. There are authorities in other jurisdictions we have visited. We are meeting it more regularly now and we are about to get our first remit from the Policing Authority to consider problems in the deployment of Garda resources around Ireland. It has also given us documents for feedback, the code of ethics and its strategy statement. We have a very good relationship with it. We are independent and need to maintain that independence from the Policing Authority but we have a good working relationship with it.