Mr. Kiernan Gildea:

There were questions regarding salaries, statistics and budgets, etc. Legal costs this year amount to €500,000, and there are eight cases currently before the High Court. I will not speak too much about them except to say we are the respondents in those cases and we have been taken to court. We have a small number of routine cases that go to court relating to the natural father issue I explained earlier. In cases where we are respondents, there may have been an application for entry in the register that was turned down, with the applicants seeking a judicial review or entry in the register under section 92 of the Act. We are respondents in the vast majority of cases.

The budget for the authority is €2.595 million. We currently have 21 staff and five years ago we had 34 staff. We are working quite well but it is a major challenge, and Ms Loftus has alluded to the major area of inspection and considering accredited bodies; we were declined staff for that work, but we need people for it. The last person was taken last Friday, believe it or not, for the commission of investigation into the banking issue. The majority of staff are on secondment from the Department of Children and Youth Affairs and they are returning to the Department. We are under pressure with regard to staff. There are five social workers and the rest are civil servants.