Mr. Michael Donnellan:

As the Secretary General has said, there was an envisaged saving of €31 million and that was against an overtime budget at its height of €59 million. However, when the deal came up for signature in 2005, the overtime figures for the year 2003-04 had dropped from €59 million to €46 million. This reduction was because the then Government closed two prisons, the Curragh and Spike Island in Cork, which freed up 150 officers to be redeployed back into the system, which offset that overtime difference. The real figure for benchmarking in our view should have been €46 million, which would have given a gross saving of €19 million per year. The deal was put to a vote of the prison officers and then went to the Civil Service Arbitration Board. The Civil Service Arbitration Board awarded the prison officers an 8% operational allowance and a lump sum of just under €14,000 per officer. That further eroded those saving. The next savings, as the Comptroller and Auditor General has said are just over €5 million a year in real savings or just over €8 million, if one takes in the pension costs. That explains the background to that ambitious figure in 2002-03 of saving €31 million a year.