Mr. Drew Harris:

I will touch on recruitment first. There is still great interest in joining An Garda Síochána. Ireland is in a full employment situation. I believe the thing that has probably defeated us in recent years is just the speed with which we were dealing with applications and bringing them through. We have entirely reviewed the process from the interview stage and that part of the selection process to when the names come across to us. We then have four items that we have to deal with, which are vetting, medical assessment, the physical competency test, and drug testing. Most recently, we have tried to deal with these in one day. You would have explained the vetting process to people in an open day, plus putting them through the competency test, plus taking the drug test, which in effect is a hair sample measure to see if there has been any drug use, and then explaining the medical process. This is all to try to accelerate the process. Then we select individuals who will be available for the next intake, so there can be a focus upon them. In effect, instead of dealing with everybody as a single widget that is coming down the line at us, we are selecting people who we see are available and who we think we can bring quickly through the process. There are a lot of advances in what is being done.