Mr. Brendan Ryan:

I wish to make one point at the outset.

There is no suggestion or evidence that there was any waste of public funds in this regard.

Regarding the cleaning contracts that were involved in many of these matters, we had a national a cleaning contract prior to the contracts that are now being put in place. The national cleaning contract for the Courts Service was put in place some years ago and it commenced in the Dublin area. It was then rolled out to the regions; we have four or five regions outside Dublin. They started at various stages several months after the Dublin one. An issue arose when we were going to a framework document in regard to new contracts as to when the two or three years for those contracts finished. That took some resolving, but eventually it was resolved. We then went out to tender, and just before we were due to appoint new providers, there was a threat of a legal action which delayed us another few weeks. Seven of those new contracts are in place, and the other three will be completed by the end of the year, or we have ceased procuring those goods. Circular 40/02 is an area in which I take personal interest and I regret that this has happened, but there was no waste of public funds. It came down to interpretation as to when the previous contract ended and there was some misunderstanding with regard to that. We have cleared that up now. As I indicated, since the report seven of them have gone into the new contracts and the other three will be resolved by the end of this year.