Mr. Pat Leahy:

I will focus on the hate crime aspect. As the committee knows, there is no offence of hate crime in this jurisdiction at the moment and the committee might consider that. Our definition of hate crime comes from the Macpherson report about racism and discrimination. While An Garda Síochána extrapolates the elements of that and has them on its system in terms of offences, it is not as efficient as it should be. We must accept that hate crimes are occurring in this jurisdiction that we are not capturing them. Everyone will accept that. To capture them, we are working closely with other agencies to define a potential offence of hate crime and then it will be put forward for consideration. We need to move into that space and we are not there yet, but it is something that must be considered.