Ms Josephine Feehily:

I can only go back to my earlier replies. The alarm bells certainly started ringing. We rang them in that report and we gave it to the Minister. We are not auditors. We are not investigators. Our authority in relation to spending by An Garda Síochána is limited. There is a tiny section in the Act which states we must give the Minister a view once a year as to the adequacy of Garda resources. Not being able to deal with them in terms of the financial Vote, we deal with the issue through our oversight of the modernisation plan and through our insistence that they should be engaging more professional civilians to do their work. In fact, in the past year we approved a number of senior positions for permanent civil servants to staff the strategic transformation office. We come at the issues that bother us using the levers we have of the modernisation plan and reports to the Minister but we have no function in investigating or overseeing the day to day spending by the Commissioner. That is just the way it is.