Mr. Drew Harris:

I will touch on some of the other matters. Where we have replaced a Garda member with a staff member, by and large that garda has stayed in his or her local area and has started to deliver policing. We have already outlined some of the impact of that such as being able to supplement the response units and the 24-7 units. We have also been able to re-staff stations that we had retained but within which our presence had not been retained, with only a nominated member or a couple of members assigned to the station. That has been a big advance. This also applies to our other community policing teams in the cities. Some of those redeployments have been in headquarters where perhaps a superintendent, inspector or sergeant had held a role and once they finished in that role had moved on, and they were then replaced by a staff member. In effect that prevented somebody else being brought in. We are keeping a focus on operational delivery by sworn members of the organisation. We see this as a positive. The next step will be different because we will be identifying roles currently being undertaken by members, which will have a more direct impact with the public. I refer to the front desk type role. We have a lot of resources tied in to providing front desk services and 24-7 services in lots of areas, and in maintaining that using Garda staff members. Again, this would release sworn Garda members for patrol duties. The focus is very much on community policing.

It must be said about An Garda Síochána that it has a strong community focus and there are very fine people working in the organisation. They have asked for many of the reforms we are now putting in place. We can see this through the cultural audit. They want to be freed up from bureaucracy and they want to get out there to provide the service to their local communities. There is a great attachment between the service they provide and the local communities. We want to make sure that this is not eroded and that it is enhanced.

There is a 90% confidence rating in the organisation, which is very significant. Regrettably, the senior leadership team is languishing at around 42% to 45%. We have a lot of work to do to make sure the public can see that we are leading an organisation and making sure we are providing all the supports we can to personnel on the front line, whatever it might be. It might be community policing and it can be the national units and specialist detective work. We are also a national police service and we have a wide range of demand placed upon us.

On the issue of information communications technology, ICT, one of our focuses is to try to make things easier for the individual garda out on patrol. The mobility programme is a particular focus for that. Members will have a phone that will have functionality to allow the garda to take a photograph of a licence or a number plate and then get connectivity back into our records. This is a significant improvement. It worked very well when we piloted it and now we want to run it out to roads policing and to critical areas where there is a lot of policing demand. That will start this year and should be rolled out by the end of 2020.

I have mentioned some of our other significant programmes, including the resource deployment management system, which is essential in order that we know where our people are, what they are doing and when they are there. The paper-based system we have at present does not really give us the management tools we need to achieve that. This important initiative is not being introduced as a cost saving but as a management tool. I think it will make a significant enhancement because we will know better where our resources are at any given time. The investigation management system will also give us much more information about the demands that are placed on us. When all of this is considered alongside developments like the second generation of the command control system, it is clear that we are starting to build up a better picture of the demands that are being placed on us and of how we are spending our resources in meeting those demands. We are also better placed to assess whether there is more we should do in terms of the structure of the organisation and the skills within the organisation to meet changes in demand.

These ICT systems are very significant. ICT will always be going through evolution and change. We are probably skipping a generation of criminal justice ICT systems, but that is all to the good. We can learn from what others have done. We can implement the things they have found useful while being innovative in our own right in terms of what we want to achieve.