Mr. Drew Harris:

The Garda College is responsible for delivery of training but we have local CPD training too. As a result of Covid, we accelerated our online training and now have extensive online training provision. We introduced the new Garda education training system in March 2023, and it regularly has 30,000 logins per month from people accessing training. Last year, the college provided 25,000 training days around crime specialists and operational skills. Leadership management professional development provided 44,000 days. That is dwarfed by the foundation training provided for our trainee gardaí. There is a big investment in the attendance of personnel in third-level programmes. That can often be on their own time. Last year we partially funded 125 such programmes and we fully funded 24. I think that 2,000 people have been through the human rights certificate provided by the University of Limerick. People by and large were doing that in their own time. The learning management system, LMS, training and in-person training is all on duty. People are also undertaking self development, primarily in terms of qualifications, in their own time. There is a mixture there. If you count those qualifications as training, because they are related to things like governance, the executive leadership programme, certificates in fraud, e-crime and court presenting, there is plenty there applicable to the police role. People are undertaking those courses of their own volition as part of their professional development.