Ms Josephine Feehily:

I would not want the Deputy to think that the fact I said we had not yet made up our minds meant that we had not started the work. Before the summer break we assigned several members of staff to start the process of interviewing each authority member to gather their views on each of those questions and on all the sections in the Act. This is in order that we can have a draft prepared that the authority can consider as a whole. I am quite satisfied we will both have and express views on the constraints in the Act under a number of headings. I do not quite know what those collective views are just yet.

The reason I connected this to the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland is that we must also issue a submission to that commission, so I suspect the product might serve two purposes. That is the connection I see there. I am certainly on the record as saying at the Committee of Public Accounts recently that I thought we in the authority should have a stronger role in the areas of resourcing, deployment, budgets and so forth. That is something we have said. I mentioned the other issues. Recruitment is very awkward because it is different for every rank. The ambiguity over accountability does not help. When we are considering something, we have to read the Act as a whole, and it may well be the case that the answer is not to empower us in the authority but perhaps to empower the Minister instead, and commentators have made that point. Ambiguity and confusion do not help. We will be raising points like this, but precisely how we will come down in the end is a matter on which the authority as a whole has to take a view.

I agree with Deputy Wallace with regard to the commission, by the way, as does the Policing Authority as a whole. All the reports of the inspectorate are very good but the two major reports, the one on crime investigation and the one on changing policing, together provide an enormously useful blueprint. That is why we are very rigorous about following the changing policing report and establishing whether this or that has been done. We will keep doing that, the commission notwithstanding. The commission has considerable value to add from two points of view. First, and I have found this to be true myself and I think the committee will appreciate it, the Policing Authority landed out of nowhere. It did not have the value of, for example, the Patten commission in Northern Ireland. When the authority is asked to explain why this model was chosen over any other model, it is very hard to find analysis of this other than in Oireachtas debates and speeches. It would be very useful if a body of work were carried out to set down the rationale behind the model, whatever that model might be, for policing, oversight, security and so on. There are any number of models globally, all of them valid, as it depends on the problem one is trying to solve. That would be a useful piece of work to see.

I would also very much like to see the commission address a number of big existential questions that have never really been examined. One is the policing security split and the other is the issue of democratic accountability. No analysis has been done of these questions. We also have joint policing committees of a particular type. Are they strong enough? Is that where accountability should lie? Should it be local as opposed to national? The commission could contribute real work that no one has examined to date in any kind of academic or analytical way. I am optimistic that the commission will add real value and an enhanced policy basis for some of the choices to be made with regard to policing oversight. I am also quite sure that what will emerge at the end will be a different Policing Authority, however different, but certainly different in some respects. I see the commission as having value to add in these terms.