Ms Justice Mary Ellen Ring:

I could not say that off the top of my head in any secure way but it is of concern and we review it on a regular basis that anything that goes beyond the 12 month period is watched very closely. One can see from the work on hand at the end of December 2017, in terms of the criminal investigation and disciplinary investigation side of the house, there were roughly 489 cases. There are five teams dealing with those cases. We have five senior investigating officers, one of whom has been moved into the protected disclosure unit and we have a vacancy at that level which we are recruiting for. If one takes simply 489 to 500, divided by five, one is looking at teams that have significant caseloads and that contributes clearly to delay in any given case.

I will not look at any particular case but in terms of a serious matter, I would love to have the resilience to take a complaint from a member of the public who has suffered a tragedy, for instance, and say we are going to deploy people to work on that case alone. We cannot do that. That is why we had to bring in the Garda to deal with Templemore. We would not have been able to move that investigation along and I had decided that if we did not have that assistance we were not going to do the Templemore investigation, because otherwise it would be years down the road before we would have any conclusion.