Mr. Mark Toland:

The first thing one needs to do is to make sure one's people are in the right place. We are recommending that they take a critical look at where every Garda member is positioned at the moment if they are not in an operational role. Do they need to be in that role? We found roles that should be performed by Garda support staff. We found sergeants in roles a garda could do, so there is an issue regarding whether it needs police sworn powers and whether it needs to be done by a sergeant or inspector or whether it could be done by a garda. That is the first thing.

Second, if one is going to allocate resources across the country, one needs to have a scientific method of allocating those resources. At the moment, we are not convinced people are allocated according to policing needs. If we went to Tipperary, as part of this exercise, and looked in detail at the way it deals with calls from the public, we would find they are recording these on paper systems. Asking Tipperary for this data around deployment took so much longer than the other divisions we looked at, such as Cork city and a division in Dublin. They were able to press a button and give us the details of all the calls they dealt with. If people are not allocated according to need, it means places that have an older workforce where people are retiring and where numbers are lost are disproportionately losing people because they are being promoted or are going to other places. We are not convinced that people are assigned and allocated according to the needs of those policing areas. It is a major issue. There will be people who will gain from this process and those who could lose from it because one runs a process about allocation, some people will have too many and some will not have enough. We are suggesting that they introduce a system of determining demand and then allocating resources. We think we need to build the organisation from a division upwards. It involves looking at what the demands around 999 calls are, how many people are being arrested and what the local demands are and building resources around that demand, building up to the regions and then building up to headquarters because they are in place to support the delivery of local policing services.

We were quite shocked by some of the results, particularly around the number of full-time community gardaí allocated across Ireland. The numbers were very low while the numbers in Dublin were huge. There are 540 full-time community gardaí across Ireland, 328 of which are in the six Dublin divisions. A total of 117 of those are in one division in Dublin, so one Dublin city centre division has 117 community officers. Limerick has 50, Cork city has 27 and Waterford has 20. When one starts to add those up, one can see that most of the resources are in the cities. When one looks at the rural communities, one will find that there are 14 divisions with ten or fewer community gardaí covering 365 days a year, 24/7. Two divisions - Kildare and Mayo - do not have full-time community gardaí. This is what the public is noticing because they are the people known to the community, the people the public contact and the people who go to community meetings. We ran this process. It had not been done before. This is something that should be run on a quarterly basis because as an organisation, one needs to know at 11 a.m. that if a major incident happens, one has the right number of people on duty with the right skills. It is not about numbers. One needs to have a certain number of detectives or traffic officers on duty at certain times, so it is good practice to do this. It is a snapshot in time. We can only say this is what we found when we ran these.

Another worrying thing was the number of Garda reserves. There are 1,124 Garda reserves but on that Saturday night across Ireland, only 34 were on duty at 11. p.m. That is a time when one would expect to see to them. We have met the Garda reserves. They are good people but again, they are not being used to the best of their ability. They provide a physical presence. We want An Garda Síochána to become an organisation that prevents crime. It involves getting out there and having a uniformed presence to try to stop the crime from happening because that will reduce demand.