Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Leader will note that Mr. Draghi of the European Central Bank, ECB, said today that he does not wish to appear before the banking inquiry here but he might participate informally. He went on to say that they had to pull the plug on what was happening in Ireland because the equivalent of 85% of our GDP was being given to enhance the liquidity of the Irish banking system. That is why he should participate and give evidence because that was putting fuel on the fire, and the bills had to be collected by Irish taxpayers. Why did the ECB give so much money to banks, which eventually brought down the country? I hope he will reconsider that decision and that there will be support in the Oireachtas that he should appear before the inquiry.

I refer to the Garda Inspectorate report. There has been an emphasis on statistics but there are problems with that. I gather it is an issue with the New York Police Department that turning policemen into people gathering statistics tends to erode public faith, and it erodes community policing. Some policing may require no statistics at all; it just works. There are problems with public service morale also. A former member of the NYPD, Professor John Eterno, has drawn attention to that. More importantly, however, are the numbers that emerge from the report. That a significant proportion of gardaí are engaged in administrative and non-operational duties is noteworthy, according to the inspectorate. Twelve per cent of members are engaged in detective duties but they perform much less than 12% of the investigation of crime. The norm in other jurisdictions is that they should perform more than that percentage. The amount of time spent on operational policing and criminal investigation in the Garda college is only a quarter, which is much less than the amount of time spent on language skills. We have 700 untrained detectives. Only about 31% of fingerprints, which are needed to solve cases, are actually taken.

I hope the Minister for Justice and Equality would come into the House to address the issues. Let us leave the statistics to the statisticians. There are serious managerial and operational issues highlighted in this report.