Ms Josephine Feehily:

-----we can pick them up, I have no doubt. I will first take a few that can be dealt with quickly. We received the report on homicide data in the past couple of days and I will be bringing it to the authority meeting tomorrow. We now have a report.

To take the totality of our frustration at the delay, the data quality and that group of questions together, the questions relating to homicide data, the mandatory alcohol testing, MAT report and so on, I was struck by the remarks in Kathleen O'Toole's letter, which we would share, about management capacity. She references engagement with us in her letter. I am still not sure to what extent some of these issues are down to non-compliance or just poor capacity at management level. Until one could bottom that out, the question of deciding that one wanted to make any kind of approach to a Minister would not arise. We are very much at the stage of working through this; our third report was quite shrill, it is the shrillest. We were working, as I said in my opening statement, in a framework of setting targets, measuring them and saying why did they not do it, and moving along in a methodical way. We came to that report, which was quite shrill. Any consideration of what one might do next such as approaching the Minister to compel was something that would have been in the future. We certainly have not got there yet. We have discussed before the parameters of our power and I do not disagree with anything the Deputy has said in that regard.

As regards the question of the GSOC, we certainly did consider, on a number of occasions at official level, whether they were items to refer to GSOC but it emerged that the items before us, to my recollection, have all already been to GSOC and it was clear from the material that came into us that GOSC was already seized of them. Therefore, the need for a formal referral did not arise, but we certainly looked at a number of cases from that point of view to satisfy ourselves that they were already with GSOC and that we did not need to formally send them.

Those are answers to some of the questions.

The authority has yet to consider its two-year report in any detail. There is also a procedural point, in that the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland has been asked to review the whole firmament of oversight and accountability. We will make a submission to the commission on that point as well as every other point in its terms of reference. I imagine that the two-year report to the Minister and the submission to the commission will end up being a package. I am pretty certain that we will be making some observations about our powers, but we have not yet decided what they will be. I am certain that we will be making some observations about some of the recruitment confusion that I outlined in my opening statement between different processes for every level. We will be noting the accountability ambiguity - let us put it that way - that is in the legislation and needs to be attended to. However, the authority has not yet come to a view on the content of the report.

Regarding section 11, and as any oversight body would, we made sure to understand the parameters of the various sections of our Act. To that extent, we had a conversation about whether we knew what the section meant. However, the authority has never sat down for a formal consideration in a particular instance of the use of section 11.