Ms Justice Mary Laffoy:

There was some element of duplication in the 13,000 submissions but not an awful lot.

We put 12,000 submissions, which were accessible by the members and the public, on the website. In a sense, I would have liked if there had been more time to make more use of the submissions but I am happy that we did make use of them and that we engaged the members of the assembly with them as best we could. All of the submissions were up by March this year but, not only that, at the start we prioritised those of the advocacy groups and put them up first. Then, as I said in my opening address, we had one session on submissions. For that we prepared a random sample - a booklet - that was probably this big. It had 300 randomly selected submissions. We had a session on that. I hope I am not taking up too much time but Ms Finegan may briefly explain how the random selection was made. Given the various engagements we had with the citizens on the submissions, I think they got benefit from them. I am happy enough about that. I am conscious of the fact that many people went to the trouble of making submissions - some very good submissions - and I hope they are not disappointed that we did not make more use of them. However, we made as much use of them as we could within the period available to us.