Mr. Mark Toland:

I was going to talk about the report on crime investigation, as well as the CSO's report. The CSO conducted its first review of our crime statistics about six or eight months after we had produced our report and completely validated our findings. It found what we had found and perhaps even a little more in some areas. It went back this year to look at the matter again. This is, therefore, the third time it has arrived at the same findings and for three years running. Most disappointingly, if a member of the public walks up to a garda on the street or rings to reports a crime, it will not always end up on PULSE, the crime recording system. That is a real worry. Once it is recorded on the system, it can be audited, one can find it and decide whether it has been included in the right category. However, the lack of recording on the PULSE system is a gap. The CSO has again found Garda stations that do not have a book or a computer system to record the fact that a member of the public has rung to say he or she has been the victim of an assault. This makes auditing impossible. It is impossible for senior managers in the Garda to know exactly how busy gardaí are if they do not record every time a member of the public rings to report an assault or a public order incident. It is very difficult to decide how many gardaí are needed if it is not known how busy they are. We were disappointed, therefore, to see the CSO come back in three reports running with the same issues. In my opening address I spoke about a new system as part of PULSE which was introduced in November 2015. My organisation believes it is the biggest change the Garda has ever made in the management of crime and I anticipate that the CSO's report next year will be far more positive as a result. The Garda is now monitoring investigations daily; it knows exactly how many investigations each individual garda is managing and has a sergeant assigned to manage the investigation. It is a much more robust system, one we would like to have seen in place many years ago.