Mr. Robert K. Olson:

What Deputy McFadden has described happened when the original roster was in place. There was a previous report on resource allocation, of which I was the author in a previous life. In that report we said clearly that the roster had to be changed. We even brought in a noted PhD on sleep awareness. The expert was clear that it was killing them and that working that roster over 30 years would take years off their lives. As a result, we laid out some criteria, not the least of which was the European working time agreement, to change that.

What has happened in this case? I will try to stay specific to the investigative or detective process. It was designed initially to try to get a bulge of people working primarily on the weekends at night. When the study was carried out in 2007 or 2008 public order, particularly in rural areas, was a major issue and the force simply did not have people in place. Consequently, the Garda designed a roster that would put more people out on the street during that timeframe. It certainly accomplished that although it had some minuses because on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon when that number of gardaí were not needed, they were tripping over each other. That was not a good thing either. There was a balance problem. Anyway, as far as investigations are concerned, detectives need to be available to do investigative work. Previously, many of them were not on a roster and were working from Monday through Friday from nine to five when the courts were open. They had the ability to get warrants and follow-up with people at home. They would work into the early evening hours to catch certain people, for example, witnesses who they could talk to after work. Anyway, we do not need detectives sitting around at 1 a.m. At that time they are not doing anything and they cannot talk to anyone. They are not going to get CCTV footage and view it. They cannot do any of that work at that time. We can take this all the way down to gardaí. As Mr. Toland mentioned earlier, many gardaí carry minor cases, although others are not so minor. There are implications for their ability to work on such cases. For example, a garda may have been working days and then suddenly changed to working nights. At 2 a.m. he is not going to follow up on a case in those circumstances.

The four days off was a problem because basically they lost track of their cases. Victims and witnesses did not have access to them. We identified many problems in the report relative to that. There is also the issue of working six straight ten-hour days in a row. Let us suppose there is a court hearing and some hours of overtime as well and so on.

Every superintendent we talked to said that by the time they get to the fifth or sixth day, they are dragging and are not up to the full level of alertness and productivity that they should have.

We focus specifically in this report on the case accomplishment. There would be a victim from whom they might have taken a report on the last day of their work and it is five or six days later before they even get a call in to them. There is then the question of access to an open store so they can view their CCTV or do whatever else they had to do. We found a myriad of problems that are identified in this report that indicated that probably was not a good idea for a criminal investigation. We know the Commissioner has a group that is reviewing again this work schedule. We will be anxious to see what they come up with but I can tell the Deputy that in the Haddington Road agreement review we will be making some more specific recommendations to the roster.