Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank our witnesses for their opening remarks at their responses. I apologise for my delay because I am attending another committee at the same time. I thank Mr. Justice Mahon for the presentation and for the answers he has given.

I want to touch on a few items if I may. Perhaps these questions have been answered already but I would appreciate responses to them.

I was looking at the number of complaints in the various annual reports from 2017 right through to 2020. To take one figure in isolation, which stood out to me, is the Air Corps. The figures are broken down, and maladministration is a category in the 2017 to 2018 report. There are 18 cases. I am unsure as to whether they are initial complaints or if they are complaints that went through an initial process and then went on to be investigated. In 2019, again for the Air Corps, the category of maladministration cases dropped to eight and in 2020 to two cases. Without drilling into every category in every single aspect of the Defence Forces, will Mr Justice Mahon elaborate please on why there was such a high figure? Was that report amalgamated between 2017 and 2018? Even if so, it is still higher than the previous years. I will lead with this question first please.