Mr. Pat Leahy:

If it has come across that I am frustrated with other agencies, we need to knock that on the head because no one has the high moral ground on this one. The system is the system, and no individual agency chose it. My experience, from working with the other agencies, is that the best of the best people I have worked with in my career have been in other agencies, along with An Garda Síochána. When they come together, they can move mountains - that is for sure.

Is a bit of alignment required? Yes, absolutely, but this is looking to the future as well as looking back into the very recent past, when we understood that partnership was the way to go.

It takes time to turn the ship - that is for sure. I go back to the joint agency response to crime, JARC, in which we have been working together for the last two years with agencies with which we previously did not have a service level agreement. We have found that it is absolutely the way to go, but it takes time. We now have the Department on side and the Minister opened the evaluation; therefore, we are getting into that head space across the spectrum of agencies. In the future there is no doubt that alignment will be an absolute requirement, down to ground level. Everybody is moving into that head space; it just does not happen overnight. That is the reality.