Mr. John Crawley:

I can give the Deputy an account of where we are at with the current legislation. The authority has substantially resolved all significant litigation. It had a very significant piece of litigation running for a number of years, taken by one of the joint venture partners, Bernard McNamara, who was involved in the Irish Glass Bottle site development. That litigation was successfully concluded in early 2013. It was a cashless win unfortunately for the State, because although we successfully concluded the case and were awarded costs, unfortunately, the joint venture partner is bankrupt. Therefore, the State will not have an opportunity to recover those costs.

At any point in time there will be a number of litigation or threatened litigation cases against anybody and the docklands authority is no different. We have provided against all of those in our accounts to the extent that we consider that it is reasonable to assume that liability will arise. We have not made any class of a significant provision in relation to those cases.

We have a number of disputes with various people which are ongoing because of projects in which we were previously involved. We believe they will be successfully resolved. There will be a number of cases that will remain outstanding on the wind-up of the authority, if we assume it is wound up in the foreseeable future. We are working with the law department of Dublin City Council, DCC, and with the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government to assess those cases to make sure that Dublin City Council is the logical place to transfer those cases, to the extent that they relate to local authority-type issues. We also wish to ensure there is sufficient briefing in place and sufficient funding in the event that a liability will arise. As we speak – touch wood – we are in reasonable shape in terms of outstanding liabilities.