Ms Lois West:

I have been working with An Garda Síochána for nearly 11 years. When we had the first analysts in in 2008 we hit the ground running. We have done some exceptional work right from the beginning. The analysts and the management team in GSAS have always raised a concern about the quality of the data with which we had to work. When analysts produced a report, they tended to put a section into it outlining the particular data quality issues that were hampering their ability to do a complete and robust analysis. We have also found that the analysts frequently have to do quite a lot of data cleansing to make the data as workable as possible, which is far from ideal because it is very time-consuming and takes away from the ability to actually do the work. These concerns have always been raised in these reports, many of which ultimately ended up with senior Garda management, and this issue has been discussed along the way. I feel there have been many occasions on which we have escalated reports and they may not have got the requisite attention. That said, I would make a qualification. We have an exceptionally good working relationship for the most part with the officers within An Garda Síochána. Exceptional support is given to operational work and particular investigations, and we do a lot of work to feed into the formulation of strategies and so on in so far as we can. For me, this has polarised things quite a lot. What has happened in this instance is fairly exceptional. Previous to this, it was perhaps a failure to fully address issues that was raised in reports. This, to me, feels like probably a little more than that.