Mr. John O'Callaghan:

In respect of oversight and governance, we have put in place extensive oversight arrangements with An Garda Síochána which were not a feature of arrangements in the past. We have regular governance meetings with An Garda Síochána. We meet monthly in respect of oversight of financial and HR issues and so on. I would expect that a situation in which a report was prepared and the Department was not given sight of it at the time, as happened in 2008, would not arise now. We would have line of sight because we have these very regular and quite intense engagements. The other change in the landscape has, of course, been the establishment of the Policing Authority, which also has an oversight role. Things have clearly changed in respect of governance and oversight but the arrangements we are talking about here are arrangements which were put in place many years ago. They date from before the Commissioner was the Accounting Officer, to a time when the Department had that role. There was a change along the way. Perhaps systems did not keep up with the change to one extent or another, or perhaps things were missed in the changeover. The governance arrangements are now in place and if something like this were to happen again I am reasonably confident that we have enough engagement to know about it and that we would be able to take action.