Ms Josephine Feehily:

I am happy to account for our exercise of oversight, in that regard. I have no problem with that, but accountability of the Garda Commissioner is explicit. That is the only point I was making earlier.

In terms of what we have added, I have spoken before about something in which I really do believe, namely, the soft power of transparency. I believe that the arrival of the Policing Authority has been hugely significant both for An Garda Síochána and the Department of Justice and Equality in the sense that we have set out measures in a policing plan and have measured that. We have done stuff every month. We have had public meetings and published reports. There is an evolution there that was just absent in terms of rigour and follow-up. With the best will in the world, neither the Department, the Minister nor this committee will be engaging with An Garda Síochána in the way we are. I think that is the change breaker or the context changer. When we set out our work programme for this year, for example, we would have advised An Garda Síochána in December that we were planning to have a public meeting about roads policing in April. One can question what would have happened if we had not done that. We had already identified the issue about checkpoints and the issues around the data in our committee sessions. The evolution of transparency has been hugely beneficial and the authority has played its part in that.

We have the framework and we think we have a contribution to make within that framework. We see it as an evolving work in progress. We will have views about where it should go next. In the meantime, the code of ethics has been on the Statute Book since 2005, for example, but nothing was done. I am not saying no work was done. Lots of work was done but there was no code of ethics. Now there is a code. It might sound simple but last Friday week-----