Mr. Ciarán Breen:

Typically, any plaintiff in a complex case will want to get his or her proceedings out. In other words, he or she will want to put his or her case before the courts in terms of the legal documents required such as a personal injuries summons and so on for the purposes of laying out what the claim is about and where there have been failures by the defendant.

In these particular cases the women are anxious to do this to get their proceedings out in any event because they want to make sure they are within the Statute of Limitations. That is an important issue for them. They will also rely on an expert report and will want to paraphrase some of its content in their pleadings. In the hopefully unlikely situation where mediation fails, many of the women will want to fall back on the court. In any event the women, some of whom are gravely ill, would want the court to lay out set timelines. That is a choice for the women to go to court to set these matters out for their protection.

The process that we are engaged in respect of the mediation effectively runs parallel to that process. The judge keeps an eye on the case on a case management basis to make sure the parties are doing what they should do because the women are gravely ill. At our end, we are going as fast as we can to mediation, which is exactly what the Taoiseach had said.