Mr. Drew Harris:

We are an organisation that is growing. We are an organisation that is appropriately staffing those Border divisions and districts even as we speak. Later in November we will have another 180-odd staff. Our members will graduate from Templemore and go out to stations throughout the country. We are staffing that appropriately as we see the threats at this time.

There are three areas of concern. The first is local policing and local reassurance and confidence for people. I know the Police Service of Northern Ireland is also concerned about this. People living close to the Border will be worried and will have a fear that their area could be raided from the other side, backwards and forwards, and there is the fear of crime and the travelling criminal crossing the Border.

There is also the reality of night life in Derry, where a lot of young people travel across the Border to engage in night life there but there is also attendant crime. It is about managing those scenarios where a serious crime may be committed in one jurisdiction but the perpetrators are located in the other jurisdiction. How do we manage the evidential issues that emerge from that? We want to know how well the European treaties, particularly around criminal justice, are going to withstand Brexit or what will go in their place.

Organised crime is the third area of concern. Any change in trading tariffs gives opportunity for smugglers to make illicit profits or to evade tax or duty. There is an organised crime element to that and any organised crime element on the Border will also provide some additional element of funding to terrorist groups, dissident republicans in particular. It has been suggested that they might use this as an emotional driver for their particular campaigns, and we want to avoid anything like that at all. We want to avoid them being able to use this as a rallying call. There is a lot of focus on a hard border in terms of the threat of terrorism but there are two other elements as well that are equally important. We as an organisation have been engaging with the Police Service of Northern Ireland since the Brexit vote in respect of this. We have plans in place but we are not yet quite sure what the nature of the Brexit is going to be, so there is an unknown element. We have prepared as best we can for it.