Mr. Ciar?n Breen:

There are two things about that, Deputy. The first relates to our own barristers. The State Claims Agency procures its barrister panels, which we did both last year for our senior panel and this year for our junior panel, and that is a very particular procurement process. The reason we do that is to make sure that we control our costs. We rarely use more than one senior counsel in an individual case. There are times when two are needed. It is normal, particularly in clinical negligence cases, for there to be two senior counsel representing a plaintiff. However at the moment normally we only pay one senior counsel. Having said that, we are seeing more and more, particularly at legal costs adjudication, that where there is an application to have two senior counsel for a plaintiff in a case, they are making allowances for that at the legal costs adjudication end. If that was to become a feature, where there are two senior counsel paid for by the State in these cases, that would add to costs significantly.