Mr. John Redmond:

We believe that GSOC should be answerable to the new Garda authority. At present, complaints may only be made to a High Court judge.

Where there are new variants of oversight groups and there are increased budget requirements, these should be provided by way of additional budget as opposed to being taken from the existing Garda budget.

The confidential recipient should not be GSOC or the chief superintendents in the Garda organisation. GSOC should investigate all complaints made to it and should not "lease back" complaints to the Garda organisation for investigation.

The Guerin report mentioned the lack of supervision for probationer gardaí. We have raised that and similar matters for many years. The lack of supervision is as a result of a lack of available sergeants to mentor and coach probationer gardaí, in particular when they enter the Garda organisation.

The new roster introduced a new unit, meaning that the numbers in the Garda organisation are now divided by five as opposed to four previously, because there were four units. Reducing the numbers adds to the burden on current numbers in the Garda organisation, which are just above 13,000. There are ratios in EU police organisations of police officers to citizens; no such ratio is applied to the Garda organisation. This means that the numbers in An Garda Síochána are decided on a subjective basis.

An Garda Síochána is a police service. The idea that an annual budget can be set aside to deal with everything that might occur in any year is not realistic. While we must be conscious of financial constraints, an emergency service cannot provide a full service to the public in the same way that a business might provide a service.