Mr. Noel Waters:

Yes, there is. A major issue that will emerge in the course of next year is the establishment of the policing authority, which will completely change the entire relationship between the Department and the Garda. Effectively, the policing authority is a new player on the scene in the justice area. It will hold the Garda Commissioner and her force to account for the expenditure of their money and it will do it in a very public way, so it will change the entire tenor of how business is done.

The legislation is almost complete in the Oireachtas. The plan is that the authority would function from 1 January. A chairperson has been appointed, Ms Josephine Feehily, the former chairperson of the Revenue Commissioners. A policing authority board is in the process of being selected. We are providing a budget for the authority of €2.7 million for next year. We are meeting with the authority next week to discuss the very issue Deputy Perry raised, namely, how the new arrangement will work. We have had several meetings in the various divisions but the next meeting will be at the highest level. I will meet the Commissioner and the chair and others to work out a pathway for how we are going to make this new arrangement work.

It is important to point out that the Minister of the day will continue to be accountable to the Dáil for the Garda, which is right and proper. We are very strongly of that view ourselves, in that in any democratic parliamentary democracy the head of police reports to the Minister of the interior or Minister for justice of the day, who in turn reports to parliament. What does that mean in practice? It means that, for example, parliamentary questions will be dealt with by the Department. The Minister will account to the Oireachtas, unlike in the case of the HSE. We have not gone with that model. We definitively decided that we would not go down that route.