Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Cabinet Committee F is a new committee, which I set up to deal with national security issues. It is not designed to meet on a regular basis but on an ad hocbasis as needed. A separate Cabinet committee deals with public sector reform, including justice reform.

My practice, as I have explained to the House in the past, is to deal with more issues in the Cabinet as a whole. I believe in collective Cabinet responsibility and where important matters need to be discussed such as Brexit, I prefer to have them discussed by the whole Cabinet rather than a sub-committee of the Cabinet. Sometimes that takes more time. It is why we often must have two meetings a week or why meetings take longer than they did in the past, but, as much as possible, I prefer to have a matter, if something is of great importance, discussed by the Cabinet as a whole rather than a sub-committee. I appreciate one needs different types of government and different styles of government for different times, but I certainly felt during the previous Government that many matters were decided by the party leaders or decided by the Economic Management Council, EMC, and then rubber-stamped by Cabinet. I have tried to adopt a different approach, involving the Cabinet more collectively in making decisions. For example, the O'Toole report was discussed by the full Cabinet first. We got to discuss it as a whole rather than sending it to a Cabinet sub-committee, which would then just refer it on for a short discussion by the full Cabinet. The same applied to the appointment of the Garda Commissioner. That went straight to the full Cabinet rather than to a Cabinet sub-committee.

With regard to the commission on the reform of policing, I want to put on the record my profound thanks to Ms Kathleen O'Toole and her team for the good work they have done over the past few months to produce this report on time and to inform us regarding a roadmap for the reform of the police service between now and 2022. The commission identified that date as the centenary of the creation of An Garda Síochána and suggests that we set it as our target date for introducing a reformed policing service in Ireland.

Among points that are particularly appealing to me in the report are the acknowledgement that policing is about more than the Garda, the need for more of what we saw yesterday, for example, which was a joint approach between the Garda and social services to responding to crime, preventing crime and preventing recidivism, and some of the proposals in respect of GSOC.

I agree with Deputy Micheál Martin regarding some of the proposals in respect of GSOC. It makes sense to move GSOC from being what it is now into an independent office as the police ombudsman, to use its permanent staff more and second gardaí a little less, and have minor complaints dealt with at Garda level rather than at the level of the ombudsman. It was correct to establish GSOC but it needs to be strengthened and modernised. The report also allows for the Garda Commissioner to be allowed to do his or her job, which is also important. The current accountability arrangements where there is a garda inspectorate, a Garda authority, GSOC and regular requests to appear before at least two committees of the Houses of the Oireachtas, namely the Joint Committee on Justice and Equality and the Committee of Public Accounts, are quite strange. One must get the balance right between allowing people to do their job and being accountable for it and then spending all their time accounting, which can make it hard to execute the job. The reports suggestions on the Garda Commissioner may be a step in the right direction in that regard.

The Government considered the report at Cabinet, noted it and provided for its publication. We have committed to study it, respond to it and develop a reasoned response and a timelined action and implementation plan before the end of the year, which is the next step. The Minister for Justice and Equality will develop a reasoned response to the report and to each of the recommendations and then a timelined action and implementation plan, which will go to a Cabinet subcommittee and then to Cabinet.

It would be useful and welcome to have a discussion on this very good report in the House. I do not want any of my comments to be misconstrued as the Government not accepting the report or the vast majority of it. That does make good sense. There are one or two particular recommendations which are controversial and, as has been noted, on which there is disagreement.

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