Mr. Dónall Ó Cualáin:

The delay is due to the onerous work that had to be carried out locally by assistant commissioners in regions where there were a considerable number of stations to be looked at in the context of justifying on a policing basis that the stations needed to be reopened. That is where the majority of the work took place.

They would have required many analysts who had to do a great deal of data gathering in the context of the census, crime reports and so forth, and how those have changed over the years.