Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

It was part of the discussion when Sergeant McCabe came to the private session. It was around whether there was an exercise of discretion by An Garda Síochána in the cancellations or being manifest in the cancellations. What we tried to do was to split out the cancellation rate by reference to where the ticket actually issued from. There was a difficulty because in the report we looked at the whole data set for 2011 and 2012 but to drill down into it we needed more information about why tickets were cancelled and so on. That was only possible from April 2012 to December 2012. It is still quite a significant number of tickets in total. The total number of offences detected in that period was nearly 300,000. One can see the split in the table as between the intercept cases, where a member of the Garda Síochána would have spoken to a driver and engaged with a driver and the non-intercept cases which are all speeding ticket cases where cameras were involved.

When we examined it, we discovered that the number of offences terminated varies significantly as between intercept and non-intercept. There is a higher level of cancellations in respect of the non-intercept cases. When one removes cancellations that relate principally to processing errors, cancellations for emergency vehicles and so on, it switches the balance so that the cancellation rates for exceptional and discretionary reasons, as recorded on the processing system, were 1.6% for the hand-held detection devices used by An Garda Síochána and notepads - where drivers are interviewed - and 1.7% or 1.8% for speed camera cases. This means that there was not much difference between terminations relating to Garda Síochána cameras and GoSafe cameras.