Ms Lois West:

I do not think it is overstating it. We do not want to cause people panic either but I would suggest that Assistant Commissioner Finn was referring to the victim screen. A lot of work has been done there in respect of technical fixes to PULSE in order to make the data collection better. When an incident is recorded now, a victim screen will come up and that will be populated with the detail of the injured party. I do not think a system exists where it would necessarily flag up when a member or someone in Castlebar went to create an incident. I do not think any big flag that this has happened before comes up. We are dependent on the incident being recorded correctly. We have "attention and complaints" and "domestic dispute with no offence disclosed" categories. That domestic dispute with no offence disclosed category was very much created to capture where An Garda Síochána is asked to respond to a house because there are reports of a disturbance and gardaí get there and do not find anything but can go in and record the fact that they were called out. I understand that the victim screen becomes active with domestic dispute with no offence disclosed incidents. Of course, it would become active if it involved an assault or crime incident as well. Our difficulty is that there has been a tendency, which I believe to be ongoing, to put some of these incidents in the attention and complaints category. Therefore, a victim screen would not be activated for that incident. One could understand how a member would still be recording a call-out to a property as an attention and complaints incident if the awareness is not there of domestic dispute with no offence disclosed. The victim screen is fairly recent so there would not be that history going back for people who have already been victims of domestic abuse or violence.

Again, we come back to the motivating factor as well. What is supposed to happen if someone is the victim of an assault, be it minor or an assault causing harm? A box should be ticked to say that this was a domestic incident. That is the easiest way for us to identify that an incident is of a domestic nature. Otherwise, we are trawling narratives for many hundreds of assaults in order to try to work out if there is even sufficient detail in the narrative to tell us whether it is a domestic incident.

I still lack confidence in it. Over time, there have been technical fixes and attempts to put various fixes in place to assist the process but it is still not a complete process. It is still not one that lends itself to easily identifying an escalation of incidents or people who may be vulnerable. Ms Galligan has done the best she can in the work she is doing and has liaised very closely with the Garda national protective services bureau. We referred any cases that Ms Galligan raised as potentially concerning to it. We felt this was the way they would get the attention they required because that national unit would be able to contact the region, division or district and ensure there was proper attention given which would assist with the proper supports being in place for the vulnerable person.