Ms Nóirín O'Sullivan:

I am delighted the Deputy has asked this question because it is something on which we have been working very hard. Going back over the years, we identified a number of positions we wanted to civilianise for the very reasons Deputy Murphy said, and get suitably qualified professional civilian members into the organisation to do this work.

Recently I tasked the deputy commissioner with this. It has taken us an extraordinary length of time, despite the fact we have a HR section which is headed up by a civilian manager. It is taking us a long time to get a workforce plan in place to do exactly what the Deputy has identified, to gauge specifically the number of people. I tasked the deputy commissioner with conducting a census across the organisation to identify that. I will now ask him to talk specifically to that issue.