Ms Helen Hall:

As I said in the opening remarks, we welcome the merger of the authority and the Garda Síochána Inspectorate to become the new policing and community safety oversight authority. From the beginning when the Commission on the Future of Policing made its report in 2018, and it was one of the things it noted. To be fair, it was an issue we had been trying to do in any event, and we decided that on an administrative basis that there would be plenty of scope for us and the inspectorate to work closely, without needing to have legislation in place. Myself and the chief inspector, Mark Toland, have been working closely together over the past number of years.

I will give the committee examples of such work as in anti-corruption, where the inspectorate would have done the report, would have kept us informed of what it was, and we would have then been pressing the Garda on implementation, would have had a public meeting on that, and would have received briefings from the Commissioner. There has been a great deal of close working. We have taken some of the reports, such as the report on child sexual abuse, and I will defer to Ms Tumelty on that, where we have worked quite closely with the inspectorate. The recent custody report that was published by the Garda Síochána Inspectorate was taken at our meeting last week. That work is a first step.

The second and more practical step is that the inspectorate is an office of the Department of Justice and the authority has been set up as an independent agency with its own Vote. Myself and the chief inspector have already recognised that there will be some easy ways to do a merger in respect of this aspect. We will start the talks and I am aware that the Department is leading out on that this year in looking at a stream of the things that are needed so that we are ready for much of it. When we were developed in 2015–16, much of the legwork was done in creating an agency and in having just the basics such as having the lights on, an office, and all the financial statements. We have started conversations on those issues but it is more important to look at ways in which we can work together in respect of the staff of both agencies.

One of the positives is that we are both relatively small agencies. Our staff number is 39 in total and the inspectorate has ten to 12 staff. The organisations are not very big and I hope that that will make it a little bit easier. Talking to people and planning for that is ongoing and is top of our business planning for this year.