Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have a question about An Garda Síochána. I do not expect the Minister to comment and I do not want us to have a back and forth on this. I would not say that he expressed optimism - I think he said he is "hopeful" - but virtually nobody else that we meet as a committee or as individual Deputies has confidence in the target figure of 15,000 members of An Garda Síochána by the end of this Dáil term. We saw the report yesterday. We have had the GRA and the AGSI before the committee. We have heard from the Garda Commissioner who argued very clearly in terms of where he sees the deficiencies and improvements coming from, but the evidence is not there. It is quite alarming that just 120 recruits came out of Templemore in the most recent round, considering that this is not something the Government has just been talking about in the past number of months or even years; this is a crisis that was identified at this time in the previous Dáil term.

I think the public will need to see more evidence of success before they will have confidence.

Turning to a few points not touched on yet, I do not know if the Minister since taking up his post has decided to have a look over the immigrant investor programme. It was introduced during the financial crisis and sold to the Irish public as a way in which predominantly third- and fourth-generation Irish-Americans or others would be able to invest in projects, in business operations or philanthropy here in Ireland. As it turned out, 33 applications were approved in respect of US citizens, while 1,614 were approved in respect of Chinese citizens. I do not think too many of them were third- or fourth-generation Irish.

Has the Minister carried out a review of that programme or does he intend to do so? I am aware of its outworkings in several instances. We talked about hotels earlier. The Nuremore Hotel was run into the ground, I would argue, as a result of the immigrant investor programme. We are battling very hard in my area to try to restore it. A factory was purchased in Carrickmacross to much fanfare too and is now being sold on. Many people would have a view that these ventures were used essentially as mechanisms to get residency in Ireland as opposed to actually creating a viable investment platform. Has the Minister considered or does he plan to have a review undertaken that is transparent? The difficulty is that in several areas where I suspect the immigrant investor programme might have been used I cannot even get questions answered as to whether this was the case because of so-called commercial sensitivity, those two infamous words in Irish politics.