Ms Helen Hall:

Last year, the authority said it needed to get an independent expert to look at the process because we were not going to try to second-guess every single case. We did that and, if you look at Mr. Penman's report that was published in November, you will see that he was satisfied with the process An Garda Síochána undertook so, yes, the authority is satisfied that this might be the number of items that were not crimes. Let us go back to the residual concern. What are we concerned about here? Of course, crimes may not have been recorded but the bigger concern and my personal worry, particularly in the context of domestic violence, is that, if something does not get into the system, that may have an impact on the ability to record on the system a risk against a woman who is potentially in danger. It also means evidence is not being gathered for barring orders and so on. That is not being built up. There are other adverse impacts outside of crime not being recorded and prosecutions not getting across the line.

However, I will say that An Garda is very seized of this matter and that it is investing a lot of time in trying to remedy it. We are dealing with 13 recommendations as part of phase 1. We also had a concern about the tone of the responses given to people. We hope that will be the next phase. There has been a little bit of a legal difficulty in that. We hope that will be resolved and that we can do that next phase towards the end of May.