Mr. Aidan Carrigan:

I repeat that the Minister shares the Deputy’s frustration on the increasing figures. We are doing everything we can to oversee the process to ensure that costs are kept to a minimum. We are relying to some extent on the Minister’s appointment of Ciarán Breen from the State Claims Agency as chairman of the claims advisory committee to achieve progress on the matter. The initial engagement of the State Claims Agency was at the request of the Minister also but it did a preliminary and short review of the risk assessment and the reserves requirement. It was the State Claims Agency that put a flag up saying that in its experience this seemed to have been considerably underestimated and needed to be reviewed further. That resulted in the administrators engaging further and digging deeper into the issue and finding an increased hole in reserves.

We are not involved on a day-to-day basis but we have an interest in protecting the taxpayers’ interest. We will meet regularly with the chairman of the claims advisory committee, Ciarán Breen, from the State Claims Agency, and with the administrators to satisfy ourselves that everything that can be done is being done.