Mr. John Redmond:

I will address the questions that arise for the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors on the proposed new initiative, which is in crude terms a buffer zone, in other words a process to create a gap between the day-to-day running of the Garda organisation and the Minister and the Department for Justice and Equality. The problem in our view is that the current Government would be the designer of the system, by which I mean the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste, the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and the Minister for Justice and Equality assisted by the Attorney General, and are all representative of the current Government parties. In our view if one were to have public representatives looking at it, those drawing up the criteria for the Garda Authority should be drawn from all parties in the Oireachtas. The composition of the authority is a whole new discussion. We have been asked to make a submission on that and we are in the process of doing so. However, we are nowhere near the finish.