Mr. John O'Driscoll:

It is always dangerous to ask law enforcement officers if they want more resources. Our demands will be never-ending. That reflects the extent of crime of the nature that we are talking about. Having said that, the Garda Síochána's approach to this has included forming bureaus that did not exist a short few years ago, which are now well-resourced, including the Garda national cybercrime bureau. It was recently provided with more staff. It needs additional staff. We are in the process of employing civilian experts in this area. We are in competition with the private marketplace. The public service and the Garda Síochána in particular are not always in a position to remunerate people to the extent that private industry can. We have a difficulty in acquiring the people we want and then in retaining them. That is a fact of life which we have to deal with. Part of the resolution to that may be bringing people in on a short-term basis, which would not be a typical form of employment in the Garda Síochána or in police services in general but it is the picture we are dealing with.

As I said earlier, the equipment being used by criminals is growing in sophistication so we need to match it. That is expensive. We have drawn on the resources of the International Security Fund recently to fund some of the decryption equipment that has been provided to the Garda national cybercrime bureau. We hope that such funding will be available in future to ensure that we can be equipped in the manner that we need to be equipped.

Demanding work is undertaken by staff, especially those dealing with child abuse imagery. A new policy was recently put in place for staff who are engaged in this sort of activity and investigation to make sure that their welfare is catered for.

To be watching that sort of imagery as part of one's job over a protracted period of time is obviously not a task we would wish upon anyone. Thus we are developing our policies in that regard. We obviously cannot acquire all the resources we need to tackle all these issues but by plugging into other agencies and by engaging in the international community we can draw upon the resources of others. This is so critical not just in the cybercrime area but right across the board, be that with drugs and organised crime, economic crime or any other type of crime. We very much engage at an international level with our counterparts in other jurisdictions and, as I referenced, with Europol, Interpol, Eurojust and all those other agencies where resources are available on a European level and a more global basis. We certainly will need more resourcing and will continuously update our requirements in that regard. We hope that with the demands which are right across the board within policing, some of those requirements can be met. The bill for An Garda Síochána this year is just slightly short of €2 billion so there is a huge amount of money involved. It is an ever-demanding requirement but on the other side of the coin we are seizing more money from the criminal networks so hopefully that will help to balance the books to some extent.