Mr. Drew Harris:

Overtime is sometimes an emotive topic but it should not be thus. We received a budget at the start of the year. We overspent the budget and corrective action had to be taken. That is my responsibility as Accounting Officer. This is public money and I have to show good management of it. There is still per roster, which is every four weeks, approximately €7.2 million to €7.3 million available for overtime, so it is not an absolute moratorium. We have covered what we believe are essential areas but have kept a small pool in the middle for emergencies or pre-planned operations. People bid in to my colleague, the deputy commissioner, in terms of releasing overtime funds for those operations. Regrettably, overtime has grown quite considerably over recent years. I feel an obligation now to get a rope around it, to understand what the money is being spent on and what we are getting for that overtime. An Garda Síochána is a growing organisation and the number of staff hours for policing is growing all the time with each release of individuals from the training college. I have to think carefully about overtime because it can quickly suck dry the ability of the organisation to be proactive in other areas and to spend money on things like training, equipment and other vital areas. I am not apologising for the cut in overtime. I regret if it is having an impact on operations but at the same time, that has not been conveyed to me. Our managers are living within the overtime that is being provided to them. It will probably be a feature going forward but we have not finalised the budget for 2019 yet. Overtime will remain in and around the figures outlined but we will have to manage it going forward. Hopefully, we will have an overtime budget of over €90 million next year but we can quickly overspend that. Then overtime starts to suck money out of other projects that we want to push forward and that is not where we want to be. We need to be managing it because not doing so takes away my ability to do other things which are also very important.