Mr. Michael Finn:

I accept that concerns were raised about this.

In the report presented to the Policing Authority in April somebody had reviewed the investigations and clarified that an investigation had been carried out in each of the 41 incidents. The error, however, was made in that we did not sit down with the analysts and raise or surface the issue of whether the investigations had all been properly classified. That was probably one of the most significant issues with which we had to deal initially. From that engagement we discovered that there had been inconsistencies in the manner in which 108 district officers across the State had interpreted our crime counting rules. They had been done in a slightly different way but none was incorrect. They had taken a slightly different interpretation of them. It is important that during the work we did between April and September we sat down with the analysts and worked out the criteria, on which we all agreed, for measuring and classifying all of the incidents. That is the piece of work that took us from April to September. We did not just sit down with the analysts; we also sat down with staff from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, which has a particular interest as it is tasked with producing statistics for homicides for Ireland and the European Union. A lot of work was going on behind the scenes on issues the CSO had brought to the table with the classifications. Once the issue of homicides classification had been raised with the Policing Authority, the CSO looked at its figures and raised some other issues for us with the classifications. We worked with it on all of the issues it had raised with how incidents had been classified. This work was ongoing in tandem with the review of the 41 incidents. It was not just a case of sitting down and not progressing the issue between April and September; a lot of work was ongoing. There is the broader picture on all of the data available, not just the homicides, on which we are focusing in the 41 cases. As I said in my opening statement, it is important to have all of the data correct.