Mr. John Twomey:

We referred to the inspectorate's reports. They relate to the broad brush of our data and our data retention. It identified specifically crime classification, reclassification, attention and complaints. It recommended that there were too many people involved in that entire process up along the chain and there was no strict rigidity in how we dealt with it.

On Monday, in our information centre in Castlebar, we made the decision that it will become the centre of excellence for the country. All decisions on classification, reclassification and detection will be made in that centre. In the work over the past year we have been considering the processes and procedures. We had to get two things into place, one was additional staff and one was additional information technology, IT, facilities to do that. The staff have now been provided. With effect from next Monday all stations in the northern region of the country will enter into this process. In essence what will happen now is that a crime will be classified by Castlebar, by the Garda Information Services Centre, GISC. The quality assurance will be provided by the same centre. Any decision about reclassification will be made by those particular people. They will assure the quality of all the data that comes in. That will cascade around the country and will take control of it. That is a clear recommendation from the Garda Inspectorate. It goes a step further in that it takes out an individual layer the inspectorate suggested should be there. On reviewing it we took that out.

We will review the crime classification, the reclassification and the detections, for example, a new domestic violence policy is coming out. The Commissioner spoke about the protective service bureau that has been established in the centre. It quality reviews incidents daily. The divisional protective service units will be in place next month, May, in three divisions around the country and that will continue to roll out. The domestic violence policy will ensure that every member of An Garda Síochána is trained in doing a risk assessment in advance of the incident; doing a risk assessment while at the incident and in the interaction that will take place with the various non-governmental organisations, NGOs, that work in this area. There is a great deal of work coming through in that specific area. Our most vulnerable victims will have access to fully trained, fully resourced investigators, interviewers and people who can deal with these dreadful issues that they encounter. That will start from next month. That is the process and that is the work this committee has done. It is an ongoing process. It takes time from a resourcing perspective and a research perspective. That work will continue. It starts on Monday and we expect that it will be completed by the end of the year.

The committee is aware from previous presentations that we are unable to properly record our call data. There is an interim IT fix coming in. It has started and we expect it to be everywhere throughout the country by the end of June, and by the end of the year there will be a form of integration with police using leading systems effectively, PULSE. We are dealing with very old technology and we are trying to bring that up to modern standards. We are putting a fix into something that is 25 years old. That is where we are coming from. We have repeated on several occasions that where there are issues of wrongdoing or matters of concern that we need to tell people we will do that. That is what we are doing in this instance. It is unfortunate that we do not have all the answers everybody requires because we took the unprecedented step of putting the information into the public domain when we felt it was the right thing to do from a cultural perspective.