Mr. Mark Toland:

"Front-line" is quite a wide definition, so it is good news. However, front-line refers to any unit, Garda member or civilian support staff who is deployed in a role that has daily contact with the public. It would be things like gardaí on patrol, detectives dealing with victims of crime, those at front counters, call takers who are speaking to the public and the victims' officers because policing is not just about people on patrol. It is about those front-line services. Most of the police services we visited have really looked at stripping back the back office support and the number of senior managers and trying to get more people into those front-line services. We are saying they should be Garda members and support staff. Some 10% is a significant percentage when one looks at the workforce. The number was 12,804 which is a significant number of members who we think should go back on to the front line. We compared a previous inspectorate report to see if there had been any difference. There has very little difference in protecting the front line when we looked at these numbers in 2010. We expected it to be higher than 83%.

Much can be done and the report has a number of recommendations, primarily about putting people into front-line services, amalgamating Garda divisions, reducing the number of regions and taking out all those layers of bureaucracy. We looked at the two Dublin city centre divisions. They are both busy and are separated by the River Liffey. Within those two divisions, there are eight administration units. The headquarters are 600 m apart, so they are very close but there are eight administration units. There are five sergeants and 23 gardaí sitting in those administration units. We think there should be one central administration unit composed predominantly of civilian support staff and not gardaí. We found a similar structure throughout the 28 divisions and 96 districts. They are keeping a traditional system and we are saying that this is waste. They should get the administrative layers into one place and get those people back out on to the front line.