Mr. Alan Mulligan:

We have already done a good piece of work in the last six or seven months with hard-to-reach groups in preparing for recruitment and how to overcome the barriers to that. We will deal with the Coimisinéir Teanga regarding the Garda Reserve, for example. Senator Clifford-Lee mentioned going into the Gaelcholáistí, which is a very good idea, although I assume it would have come up. I thank her for that suggestion and we will take it on board. She is right that we need to engage with them. We already engage with career guidance teachers at second level and college level and have done so for our next competition. We have a relationship with them. To be clear, the Public Appointments Service runs these competitions for us. As members are aware, that service is responsible for recruiting public servants across the public sector. It is very professional in what it does and would engage in a lot of these issues. We would support that as we move forward.

We are now going to take a number of different actions. Communication is a huge part of this. That is the first thing that struck us from the research we have done to date. The bottom line on recruitment is that we need to concentrate more. Rather than running a national competition, we need to start going to the communities and that would include Gaeltacht areas as well. We need to start doing that and that is one thing we will definitely do. We are drawing up a communication plan at the moment with our press office and that will be part of the campaign as we go forward. We will probably have the main garda trainee competition first and it should be advertised around the end of October. We will then follow very quickly with an advertisement for the Garda Reserve. We are preparing at the moment to do things a little differently. For the reserve recruitment, rather then everybody doing a competition in Dublin or a national competition we are going to go down to the areas themselves. We are in discussions with the Public Appointments Service at the moment because we are not sure whether we will do that on a regional basis, for the four operational regions in An Garda Síochána, or whether we will go down to divisional level.

I imagine that if we want to target areas such as the Gaeltacht, we will have to go down to divisional level and go into those areas when we are recruiting. They are some of the things we are looking at.