Ms Josephine Feehily:

There are aspects to this. We expect to have our report in a couple of weeks and then the authority will have to consider it and decide on publication, but I expect it will not be too much longer than that. We had hoped to have it sooner but one of the jobs we asked them to do was to assess Assistant Commissioner Michael O'Sullivan's report which itself was a month behind, and, therefore, we are a bit behind. That is the first piece.

Second, regarding the negative statistics, that question goes to the heart of this whole situation. There does not seem to be an appreciation in the Garda Síochána of the importance of data for policy making. Mandatory alcohol testing on a random basis was introduced as a piece of public policy and the outcome from it - to go back to my previous life - is like random tax audits and it informs us of the state of compliance across the community. It is not about recording negative breath tests, it is about making an assessment for public policy purposes of the state of compliance across the country. If the negative tests are inflated to such an extent, it completely distorts the assessment of compliance, and that then should feed in turn to deployment decisions regarding targeted check points. It should also feed into public policy in the Road Safety Authority, the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport and so on. The data for this purpose is not about crime statistics, it is about informing public policy. It is also about giving members of the community the sense that they can be stopped at any time on a random basis and if they are stopped, they will have a mandatory test. Therefore it is more complex.