Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

Certainly, a large procurement on this scale would be looked at in the course of the audit of 2017 because, as I understand it, that was when the procurement occurred. An important issue here, with regard to the type of analysis that has been done and sent, is for a procurement on this scale I would expect to see that An Garda Síochána had done an exercise along these lines to establish that a proposed contract with the value of €100 million, or thereabout, was likely to deliver value for money, and to compare it to more in-house Garda Síochána speed testing with regard to what is effective. I would expect to see that all of this type of work had been done by An Garda Síochána. If it has done this work and the analysis stands up then I would not necessarily feel the need to report on it, but legitimate questions for the committee to ask are whether the analysis is in place, what are the results of it and has it been established it is likely to deliver best value.