Mr. Gerry D'Arcy:

I refer the Deputy to the director's opening statement, which states that the total cost of this matter was €428,000, of which €281,000 represented reinstatement costs - that is, the retrospective salaries we paid to the staff concerned on their reinstatement - and €132,000 was for legal costs. That represents a period of approximately three years. The Deputy should bear in mind that the gallery is exempt from value added tax and therefore it has to incur the 23% value added tax that is charged by all legal firms. Of course, the amount represents all of the preparation and research on the part of our legal advisers for the various submissions. All of the cases had to be dealt with separately and individually. That is the way it happens both in the Labour Relations Commission and in the Labour Court. There are no class actions, as such. There was quite an amount of work that we required our legal advisers to carry out on this project over the last three years. I am not saying that it is inexpensive; it is expensive. The outcome was not to the benefit of the gallery, although that is something one obviously cannot control, but we acted as competently as we could have. The legal advice we got was as good as was available, in my view.