Mr. Aidan O'Driscoll:

Regarding all of this commentary, the Department does respond. We are not deaf. As part of our approach to constant improvement in the Department, it is quite possible that these changes would have been brought in anyway.

The first of the two areas where I have given some emphasis to the role of the new steering committee is the reference for the case for investigation. As it happens, when this issue was discussed by senior management in the Department, it was I who raised it. I suggested it would be an important function. It was put into the terms of reference of the steering committee. The second area was the decision to prosecute, about which, again, there has been a lot of public commentary. The public commentary is without merit because we prosecute in so few cases. With regard to investigations division cases, one is looking at in the order of ten prosecutions per year. Given the kind of stuff it investigates, the number is very low. In the great majority of cases, the decision is taken not to prosecute. Why? The view is taken that while something may have happened here, the nature of it is such that it would not merit a prosecution. There might be some other kind of sanction we could impose, or it might be that the evidence is not strong enough, or we might find, on investigation, that we believe there was nothing happening. We prosecute in very few cases. However, we did put the steering committee in place to act as a second pair of eyes to reassure people.