Mr. John Twomey:

I will refer to what acting Commissioner Ó Cualáin said in his opening address in acknowledging the issue of discipline, accepting that it was a difficult decision to make, that it would not address everybody's concerns and that there would be people who would agree or disagree with it. The view of the organisation was that we needed to get in behind individual elements of discipline if we want to address this issue across the entire organisation in a holistic way, as I said at the outset. On that day, the acting Commissioner said there was no prima facieevidence relating to criminality but that there was evidence of individual breaches of discipline. Looking at the scale and extent of that, the decision was made that the best way forward was to deal with this in terms of a restorative process, the systems and many other ways. The organisation has set out the decision it has taken while accepting the point that that may not be the case. What we would say is that everybody in the organisation is being dealt with under the process we are talking about. There are other ways of dealing with discipline rather than through the bog standard discipline process. That is what we are talking about. An organisation needs to learn from these issues, change its behaviour and develop. That is the crucial issue in all this, so to say that the organisation is getting away with this scot free is not accurate or a fair representation of what we have set out in our proposals and recommendations.