Mr. Ciaran Breen:

Let me refer back to what we did at the time. Immediately following the Louise O'Keeffe case and because it was then the law of the land - this was well in advance of the ECHR judgment - we wrote to the lawyers for cases with similar facts and issues to the Louise O'Keeffe case, approximately 135 cases at the time. We wrote to people on the basis that we were asking them to discontinue their actions, but that we were not chasing them for costs. On the contrary, what we were saying to them at the time was they should not be building costs. There were co-defendants in those cases and we indicated that we did not believe the State or the Minister was the culpable party.

Following the ECHR judgment, the Minister for Education and Skills issued a press statement early this month indicating that he had asked us and the Office of the Attorney General to revisit the live cases, the ones that had not been discontinued. We are in the middle of that process. Then, in the longer term, we were to review all of the cases which had been discontinued. The Minister indicated he was looking for a way forward in regard to these cases.