Mr. Drew Harris:

In starting this project I set out a number of design principles. They were drawn from my experience but also from international research and work done by the Garda Inspectorate and the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland. One of the design principles concerns what is a viable operational command structure for a chief superintendent to take on. We looked at the scale of the command structure and the work that would be associated with it. The Senator made a number of suggestions. We considered all of them. However, joining counties Clare and Limerick would have meant having a really lobsided model, given the scale of the command structure. We would have been creating a division that was considerably larger than the others.

In creating this model I set out to ensure chief superintendents would take responsibility for the local areas. I have freed up time for them by creating an administrative peer within a division. That frees them and the other superintendents to concentrate on police work. In addition, I have given them additional sergeants and inspectors. This is about chief superintendents being responsible for operational delivery, supported by the structure around them. I appreciate entirely that counties Clare and Tipperary are divided by a considerable waterway and that there is only one bridge. I see local delivery of operations on a day-to-day basis being undertaken by sergeants and inspectors, with superintendents overseeing that work and the chief superintendent having oversight of the entire division. That is our basic model for how we will deliver policing services.

All of these aspects involve an element of compromise. The compromises we have had to make in this case concern not only geography and the population numbers we could face but also the specific demands involved. That has driven some of the decision-making and some of the decisions may be contentious. However, in delivering this model across all of Ireland we have made the best fit in respect of what we want to see as our delivery model, namely, the divisional model. We have to try to fit it as best we can with geography and population. I appreciate the suggestions made by the Senator, but these models have been thought through. We considered that it was not sustainable to give one individual oversight of counties Limerick and Clare or counties Galway and Clare. It would be too large a command structure, too wide an expanse and place too many demands on the officer concerned.