Mr. Mark Toland:

Decision-making is something that we have found in crime. We have found a lot of sergeants and inspectors who are not making decisions that we think are appropriate to their rank. There is a lot of referring upwards and some of those end up in Garda headquarters for things that I think are fairly low-level. There is a perception that there is a blame culture within the organisation and that if a senior manager makes a mistake it could be career-threatening. Sometimes that can be an excuse. That may not be the reality but some supervisors might use that as an excuse for not tackling poor performance or making a decision. That certainly exists. We had a lot of people in workshops, at all ranks, who said they were afraid to put their head above the parapet and say: "That won't work," or "We need to go in that direction." That is something about which we have made a recommendation. There are ways to do that anonymously, there are staff surveys, and there are ways to encourage people to speak up, help with improvement, and to become a learning organisation. Sometimes discipline is used by police services as the first point in dealing with something, when they should say: "We need to learn from this and become an organisation that learns from mistakes and trains staff really well."

We have lots of recommendations in the report about decision-making and creating leaders who have the courage to step up and make those sometimes difficult decisions. These are not always operational decisions; they are often administrative. We found a Garda unit that has 600 files where people have referred things to them. They are things that are in garda policies, and I think those decisions should be made at a more local level and not put up to Garda headquarters because of a fear of making mistakes.