Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

If one does not know, one waits, but he said he did not have foreknowledge of the matter. This is simple. Exit surveys should not be carried out if one is not going to learn from them. The whole point of an exit survey is to learn from it. A simple answer here would have been very helpful to us. We asked a very simple question, namely, whether bullying and harassment were recorded in the exit survey. Instead of responding that the Garda has a system in place and its analysis found that bullying and harassment did not come up, the response was that An Garda Síochána had no record of any person citing bullying. That is not an answer to our question. The next question we asked was very simple, namely, whether anyone had been arrested in respect of fraud. The answer should have been "Yes" or "No" and in the case of "Yes", the number of arrests should have been given. These are simple questions, so it is not reassuring to the Committee of Public Accounts to receive such answers. Only two weeks ago, we had Garda representatives before us with their transformational presentation on their organisation and the justice committee. We want to believe them. I want gardaí on the street and in my community and I want to believe them, but answers such as these do not help.