Mr. Justin Kelly:

I have responsibility for governance and accountability and, underneath that, we have discipline and anticorruption. It is really important to say at the outset that the vast majority of gardaí are not involved in criminality or discipline issues, as the Deputy knows well. At the moment, we have approximately 97 people suspended out of a workforce of sworn gardaí of just over 14,000. This year, we have suspended 14 people.

I am in total agreement with the Deputy on the need to deal with these cases as quickly as we can. However, there are constraints on us in this regard. We review all of these cases every month. The assistant commissioner in charge of governance and accountability reviews every single one of them. Since the enactment of the new legislation recently, we give the member who is suspended an opportunity at every review to provide us with new additional information, which we will consider as part of the review.

One of the major constraints we have is where people are before the courts and the time that process takes. To give clarity, some of the offences involve serious criminality, including sexual crime, domestic violence and coercive control. Those ones alone, together with drink driving, make up approximately 27% of the cases.