Mr. Damien Moloney:

On the Chairman's point about four offices and one body with three Accounting Officer Votes, I apologise for the structure. The Attorney General's Office has three of those constituent offices but has two Accounting Officers. I hope that will all become apparent in the opening statements.

I thank the Chairman and committee for the invitation to discuss the 2017 Appropriation Account of the Office of the Attorney General and the 2017 annual report of the Comptroller and Auditor General. I am pleased to report that the office did not feature in the annual report. I am joined by my colleagues Ms Lynda O'Regan and Mr. David Donnelly.

I will commence by touching on the work of the Office of the Attorney General. Our primary function is to support the Attorney General in discharging his functions as legal adviser to the Government. In that regard, the office provides two main services to our clients - legal advice and legislative drafting. The scope and variety of the legal work is broad, with new areas of work being added continuously.

The advisory section of the office is organised into five specialist groups covering all major legal specialisms. This set-up allows the members of the group to become expert in the areas to which they are assigned and to provide a high level of expertise to clients. To develop the expertise of the legal advisory staff further and to encourage close collaboration with Departments, the office has been running a secondment programme since 2006 whereby advisory counsel from the office are recruited and placed as legal advisers within Departments. At the end of 2017, the office had 24 legal advisers seconded across 14 Departments and offices. The office also assigns an advisory counsel as legal counsellor to the permanent representative in Brussels. In March 2017, a second advisory counsel was seconded to the permanent representative to deal with Brexit in particular. The office had two advisory counsel working as seconded national experts in the European Commission and another in the European Parliament.

The legislative drafting service is provided through the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. That is a constituent office, organised into four groups, each serving a number of specific Departments. This enables the drafters to build up a high level of familiarity with the work of the client Department, which in turn facilitates drafting on complex topics. Much of the work of the office, particularly the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, is primarily driven by the Government's legislative programme. Both the advisory and drafting sides of the office hold meetings and are in regular contact with client Departments to allow for ongoing review of the services being provided.

The administration side of the office provides administrative support to both the advisory and drafting sides. It is organised into a number of business units covering human resources, finance, library and knowledge management, information technology, change management, training and development, corporate services and registry. Senior management from the administration side participates in the office's management committee, currently called the management committee and previously a management advisory committee. There is also a joint Chief State Solicitor's office-Attorney General's office management committee, which meets less frequently but acts as an umbrella for the constituent offices.

The office constantly re-assesses the need to provide legal services to its wide range of clients and so seeks to ensure that its lawyers are fully trained and resourced. This involves making sure that legal staff are fully expert in their areas of legal work and have at their disposal all resources to do their work to the highest standard required by Government. Knowledge management and information sharing is a central feature of how we operate. Precedents, procedures and practices are recorded and made available as appropriate to staff.

With regard to the 2017 appropriation account, the office operated an administrative gross budget of €15.66 million of which the outturn was €14.54 million. A significant proportion, €11.26 million, close to 72%, of our budget was allocated to salaries. This high proportion reflects the fact that the office is a legal professional organisation providing legal services to the Government and Departments and does not have expenditure programmes as such. The next largest allocation is the €2.24 million, 14.3% of our budget, for the Law Reform Commission, the sole office under our aegis. That money is channelled through our Vote as a grant-in-aid. The remaining €2.16 million, 14% of the budget, is allocated to training, IT, premises, telecoms and so on. During 2017, the office had savings in excess of €1 million. The majority of that excess, approximately €800,000, arose in subhead A1, salaries. Some €156,000 arose in A2, due to reduced dependence on contract legal expertise. Some €52,000 was from our subhead concerning the Law Reform Commission.

The savings in salaries arose due to delays in the planned filling of vacancies due to the lack of availability of panels and security vetting. The savings in A2 arose due to lesser reliance on contract drafting expertise from outside the office. The savings on the Law Reform Commission were due mainly to staff changes. In all areas of expenditure, the office closely monitors and controls expenditure to ensure appropriate use of funds and maximum value. Each month, the office's management committee is briefed on the office's financial position including such issues as the formulation of annual budgets and measures required to meet savings or staffing targets imposed by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform.

The office operates a financial management system which greatly assists me and also informs the monthly presentation on financial matters to the members of management committee. There is ongoing development of an interface with the financial management system and the case records management system, ACME, to allow for the development of costing as well as enhanced financial and non-financial management reports.

The Chief State Solicitor’s office has a separate Accounting Officer but we work closely with it through our constituent office of the Attorney General’s office. We have a joint Attorney General's office-Chief State Solicitor's office management advisory committee which meets a number of times throughout the year. In addition, we share a number of IT systems and knowledge management initiatives to ensure efficiencies and expertise are shared. In conjunction with the Chief State Solicitor's office, the office has an audit committee which includes three external members, one of whom acts as chair. Each year, the committee agrees a programme of audits and the resulting reports and recommendations are presented to the local management committees and made available to the Comptroller and Auditor General.

The committee will be aware of the Government's extensive legislative programme which places heavy demands on the office, both in the formulation of advice on legislative provisions as well as their actual drafting. The increasing pace in the delivery of Government services means that much of the advice has to be provided and the drafting carried out in a way that meets that increasing pace, at relatively short notice. There is an increasing demand for advisory and drafting services. Government amendments should be pointed out specifically. Almost 300 Private Member's Bills have been introduced since 2016. The nature of the UK's withdrawal from the European Union has yet to be determined. However, Brexit has resulted in increased requests for advisory and drafting services, often at short notice.

The law is constantly changing, through case law, new legislation and the way it is interpreted or reinterpreted. New developments of law emerge continually, including through the actions of the European Union and its Court of Justice as well as the European Court of Human Rights and changes in international law. Our main challenge will be continuing to adapt to ensure we meet the demands of our clients, including Departments and the needs of the Government. I thank the Chairman and committee members for their attention. If members have any questions, I am at their disposal.