Mr. Frank Daly:

We wanted to do two things, namely, to recover the data and to ensure there was a prima facie case to take to the Garda Síochána. I refer the Deputy to the chronology on this matter. We became aware of this on 2 August. The following day we commissioned Deloitte to carry out its investigation. I include in this regard the property transaction. It was during the Deloitte forensic examination of that transaction that an issue first came to light in terms of whether confidential information might have been removed from the agency. Deloitte commenced its investigation on 6 August and commenced a forensic analysis of e-mails on 12 August. By way of providing an idea of the scale of this task, Deloitte retrieved 164,000 e-mails sent by or to Mr. Farrell between 2005 and 2012, which was not considered an unusual amount of traffic. In respect of the period from end 2009 to March 2012, the time during which Mr. Farrell was with the agency, Deloitte retrieved 92,000 e-mails. These were then narrowed down on the basis of key word searches to 42,000, which Deloitte had to print, analyse, collate and read to determine the extent of the problem. Of those 42,000 e-mails, only 33 were of concern. I am trying to give the committee an idea of the scale of the investigation.