Maurice Hayes (Independent)

I welcome the Minister to the House and congratulate him on the efforts he has made and is making in improving the police services. If I were not convinced of that, my colleagues and I would not have been fallbacks. I am grateful for his assurance that recommendations made have been seriously considered and will be acted on. I do not want to be accused of insider trading, so I will keep to fairly general points.

I welcome the Morris and Nally reports which are hugely important. In particular, Judge Morris has given a penetrating analysis in very difficult circumstances. What the Nally report showed is the difficulty of the interface between what one may call intelligence and ordinary policing. This will always remain difficult to manage whether one has a policing board or not.

While there were things I would rather have seen in the police Act, the Act is what we have and we should work with it and start to build the necessary relationships. The Minister said the Ombudsman Commission would begin operation in the new year. It would be helpful to know when in the new year it will commence. I had thought it might be in operation in late autumn and certainly by the end of the year. If for whatever reason there has been slippage it is important to get that element into place.

It is refreshing to see the inspectorate in place. It is hugely important in benchmarking Garda practice against international best practice. These are police officers talking to police officers. When they talk the same language they have a far better chance of making an impact than any of us sitting on the outside.

I was not totally enchanted with the Barr report, for a couple of reasons. I thought the purpose of a tribunal was to establish the facts and draw conclusions from them. I get more worried when they begin to speculate on what would have happened if the facts had been different. I think that takes a tribunal into rather difficult territory.

I also think it was unfair to individual gardaí to name them. The gardaí do not go out to shoot people. The people who had to do that in these circumstances will carry that with them for the rest of their lives. It was unfair to pillory them. However, I am encouraged to know that some of the recommendations have been adopted. I wonder which ones. I hope the Garda is not waiting for every tribunal to put the last dot and comma in place. A key element of the Barr report was to ensure that in every region there were properly trained people capable of dealing with the circumstances and taking control of the situation.

The reports on the inspectorate, in which I had an involvement, made two key recommendations. The first related to regionalisation and devolution, which if achieved would result in a series of groupings leading to real accountability allowing for building up the capacity in the unit by having the people to deal with it. The other is civilianisation. I am glad the Minister has accepted that we need somebody at deputy commissioner level. The sooner that is done the better. It is important to get that person in and to marshal people under him or her. It would bring to the organisation skills and an attitude of mind that it badly needs. The support across the House for civilianisation is evident and the process needs to be accelerated. I have seen documents that suggest civilianisation could be achieved over a period of 21 years, which is nonsense. It needs to be done in two or three years. It is one of the ways to get experienced valuable policemen on the streets where people want to see them in order to be reassured.

There is a problem, which the Minister may need to take up with the Minister for Finance. It seems rather more difficult than most people believe it should be to replace a garda with a civilian because of the Civil Service numbers game. Substitutes need to be found in other places. In some civilianised jobs there may be a problem of filling round holes with square pegs because there happens to be somebody in the wider Civil Service who might, following a shampoo, become an analyst or something like that, which is a poor approach to the issue. There seems to be rigidity in this regard. It may be possible to outsource much of what is done by gardaí to other people, which is what is done in many places.

Further to what Senator Jim Walsh said, we might need to redefine the relationship between the Department and the Garda, given the new responsibility of the Garda Commissioner as Accounting Officer. Senator Cummins made a plea that the Commissioner should be left clear to take on the major strategic tasks. He cannot have everything come up the line to him. It may be because of pressure coming from this House and the other House that a Minister is expected to know everything that goes on in every Garda station. We need to steel ourselves to accept it may not be possible and to find other ways of doing it.

We need to recognise the problem in such organisations is that the position of Garda Commissioner is a lonely one. He needs some help and support — I am not sure what it is. He carries very heavy responsibility for the country. Successive Commissioners have done so with distinction and honour. What I have to say reflects what the Minister has said. In any dealings that my colleagues and I have had with the Garda, we have had a very open dialogue and found a ready acceptance of the changes that need to be made. Following the publication of these reports, there is a public mood and a mood within the Garda for change. It is important to take advantage of that wind.

Reference was made to training and recruitment. We need to recognise that those being recruited to the Garda are very different from those recruited a number of years ago. It is no longer a case of people coming in straight from school. Many people are joining with university degrees and they need to be motivated and supported. When everybody is recruited at the same age they move up the ranks at the same time and leave the force at the same time. It is critical to deal with that problem also.

Without a market for drugs, we would have no sellers. I recently read a report in a newspaper by one of these chick-lit young lady journalists who claimed that she did not know anybody who did not take cocaine, which is a terrible claim. Until some of these trendy middle-class people and some people who are in the media appear in court, it will be very hard to preach to people in the inner city about the dangers of drugs.