Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 17 October 2024
Committee on Drugs Use
A Health-Led Approach: Discussion (Resumed)
9:30 am
Mr. Justin Kelly:
If the Deputy does not mind, I might take that. She has hit on many different areas there. I will congratulate on intelligence first. We have the expertise. We buy in some expertise and we develop some of our own. I will give the example of telephone analysis, which is important for us. We have trained about 200 officers around the country. They are all spread around the country to do that type of work. We have the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau that does the high end of that. These people are trained to world-class standards. We spent a huge amount of money sending them abroad for training. The software packages for any of these areas, including cyber, phones and intelligence, are very expensive. A significant amount of our ICT budget is spent on software and programmes in these areas. That relates to intelligence.
The other area the Deputy spoke about is data. We have done much work to try to better understand the data that we are gathering ourselves. We are doing that because we want to deploy our resources in the most efficient manner we can. We have a new GardaSAFE system, which is our new dispatch system. That has given us information to a level that we have never had before. That is one thing we are doing.
At a management level, in the last year, senior managers around the country have had access to a dashboard where they can see all the crime types in their own areas. They can work out what is happening in particular areas. It is a system called Power BI. It has been a game-changer for local managers and even us at national level to get a good understanding of crime areas and what is going on. We have our Garda Síochána analysis service. In any big areas that we want to look at and do a deeper dive-----