Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

These powers are quite substantial. I would not like to think - and I am pretty sure it was not Dr. Cahill's intention to give this impression - that somehow this authorised officer might look at a situation and think that because criminal prosecution is very expensive and heavily resource-dependent, he or she will go for something else. The resources need to be made available if a criminal prosecution is what is required. I will give Dr. Cahill an opportunity to clarify if the Chairman agrees because I think my time might be up. The Chairman might indulge us with that. I would be a little disturbed if what was driving this were resource constraints rather than the necessity to warrant a criminal sanction. Dr. Cahill might want to clarify that.

To be clear, are the authorised officers people within the Department who are overseen just by the normal departmental procedures or are they subject to separate ones, given the power they will have?