Mr. Niall Hodgins:

It is very hard to comment because in the whole scheme of things, continuous professional development in the guards would rely on all of us being informed about what the Senator spoke about. There are three ingredients in the policing model the Senator witnessed in the USA which she said led to a reduction in youth homicides and stuff like that. First, it is heavily reliant on resources, which we have spoken about at length. They simply are not there. Second, it would be about interaction with the community, which I suspect would go a long way towards success. Unfortunately, under the operating model - yet again we are back to this - we have an inaccessible, impersonal, centralised decision-making process whereby we have less autonomy locally, as we have spoken about. The superintendent is gone and we have anonymous geographical call centres.

I listened to the committee last week and nearly everybody had an example from their communities of the non-service they got after making a 999 call or a call to the local Garda station, because gardaí have been removed to backfill vacancies in urban centres. What has been taken away from us is the personal-touch policing we once had in this country. It has been replaced with something completely alien to Irish society and to the guards we represent. I used the analogy recently of driving a square peg into a round hole. It is not just the GRA giving out about the operational model. It is each and every association. Because of our ranking structure, the chiefs have been telling senior governance about this. The superintendents are not here today. Both associations appearing before the committee today have been vociferous about this thing that is being driven down our throats and is not working.

The guards I represent have become symbols of what I call managerial opacity. Language has become loose and slippery. We are suffering a truth decay in our negotiations. My colleagues in AGSI alluded to any voices in our association dissenting from the Commissioner not being listened to. There is no participatory governance. The committee will hear the same from all my colleagues lined up beside me. We are not being listened to. We are talking about recruitment and retention but the play on that I use is respair and resipiscence. By "respair", I mean a complete and utter recovery from the state of despair we find ourselves in. That is where we are. By resipiscence, I mean a complete change of direction.