Mr. Liam Kidd:

I will come back to the original thing that happened in 2009. My instruction was to downsize and to reduce cost because funding was not available. At the time, in 2008, there were two chief superintendents, two principal officers and approximately eight assistant principal officers or superintendents - those are the equivalents - at the leadership level. At the time of publication of the comprehensive review of the staffing needs for ICT, we had one principal officer, two superintendents and two assistant principal officers. Compared to other big organisations, such as Revenue, while I do not want to pick Revenue out, I have a colleague there and am aware that it has nine principal officers and between 20 and 23 assistant principal officers.

Our comprehensive review saw a need for five principal officer or Garda equivalents and 14 assistant principal officers or Garda equivalents. I am talking to Mr. Nugent about building that. Since the approval of that document, we have been pushing through the process with the Department of Justice and Equality and Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to get sanction. An agreement on sanction came through with regard to principal officers and assistant principal officers. We are now starting the process of recruiting those people. There are three principal officers, so two additional officers have arrived in the last year, and we got four additional assistant principal officers in the last year. That is what Mr. Nugent and the Commissioner are referencing in that we are starting to address the leadership element.

With regard to Accenture and consultancy, I look within ICT, where we always had a dependency on pushing it down to the lowest level. That is where we would pay the least amount, where we depend on outsourced skilled resources, while having people in at the leadership, management and supervisory level as full-time Garda employees.