Mr. Drew Harris:

As I said, there are a couple of very healthy things to which to point, one of which is the people we have within the organisation. The cultural audit flagged how committed they were to public service. There is also the confidence people have in their local gardaí, which is important. There is probably less confidence in senior management. It is for me and the rest of the senior leadership team to work on improving the leadership of the organisation. Therefore, the second piece is that we have strong community contacts. Beyond that, a process of digitisation and digital investment is required as a lot of time and effort are spent in dealing with paper. When we talk about demand, it is very difficult in a paper based system to understand entirely what it is as we do not have the statistics we need to understand how much time we are spending on particular calls. We are moving towards computer aided despatch, a system which will give us far more information on what we are spending our time on in patrolling and responding to incidents. I require a lot more information and having a process of digitisation is the way to do it. Beyond that, there is the training and development of our staff. There are a lot of online systems coming on-stream that require training, but we also want to increase the focus on the human rights aspects of policing, as well as on the code of ethics and how central it is. Everyone is undergoing training on the code of ethics and that process will be completed by the end of the year. It has been a big commitment by the organisation to deliver it. The people are good, as is the level of public support. Some of the systems are old and antiquated, but there is a programme to bring them up to speed. A paper based system in an organisation of our size, given the demands with which we are dealing, is just not sufficient in the 21st century. That is what we have to concentrate on.

Some of the Garda stations I have visited are not of the standard I would expect. Some look a bit tired and rundown. Some are crowded and we have had to move outside the core premises and extend into other buildings. I know that these issues receive attention all of the time.

For my part, I also want to bring a degree of corporate governance and discipline - if I may use that expression - to what we are doing in order that we are working within a corporate framework while also providing for local autonomy and autonomy for operational commanders.