Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

I refer to a Committee Public of Accounts report in 2005 when it looked at this issue. The costing that went into the €250 million estimate was based on the number of cases in the courts at the time because it was very much focused on the courts. The belief was at the time that the cases in the court would feed into the redress and it would meet the need of people based on the courts. The average settlement figure used at the time was €127,000. When the Department met the committee about this prior to its 2005 report, it indicated it had used all the sources of information available to it in calculating the liability and, particularly, the extent to which people had applied to appear before the Laffoy commission and the freedom of information cases. That was the approach that was taken.