Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The reason I hone in on this is that at a previous Committee of Public Accounts meeting - it might have been with the Department of Justice and Equality on the Garda Síochána Vote - we remarked that, say, an inspector could in any district have 40 cases a day before him and have ten private solicitors. I think we understood that that inspector gets an additional allowance of something like €5,000 a year for doing court prosecutions. The Committee of Public Accounts members on the day were amazed by the outstanding value for money. We felt that if those thousands of cases that are dealt with for a minimal cost of €5,000 per prosecuting inspector, as the case may be, in a number of courts around the country, they would cost multiples of multiples of that if there were to be a State agency or legal people doing the prosecution. In all my time here it seemed the best value for money the State had achieved in anything. From the point of view of the Committee of Public Accounts, then, we would want a costing on that.