Ms Josephine Feehily:

The day-to-day work on that was handled by Ms Margaret Tumelty. If I leave anything out, she should feel free to come in.

We believe the Garda Reserve is hugely important. It is a neglected and underutilised resource. In the context of the Government’s decision last year to increase the reserve to 2,000 members, it is enormously important there is a proper strategy for engaging, deploying and minding that resource. It was in the modernisation renewal plan that there would be a strategy and it was marked completed. It was fairly simple. We asked for a copy of the strategy. After considerable delay, we discovered there was no strategy.

It was not much more sophisticated than that.

To be fair to the gardaí, there was a nuance in our report in that we have a different view about what "completed" might mean. There is a sense in which they have a project management approach and when certain milestones are reached, the milestone is completed, but that is not how it presents itself; it presents itself as a task completed. We are very keen that this strategy would be finished and shared with us in order that we can then examine it.