Dr. David McFadden:

With regard to the searches, the Deputy might be surprised to hear that the volume of hits or searches on our systems is vast. We get millions of hits. There are some companies that have a system set up where they scrape our information many millions of time a day to constantly update. The reason is that if a company is involved in a major corporate transaction, it must constantly update its information during the day when a transaction is about to happen, for example, whether a director is still there or whether something has happened to filings relating to a company. Parties that are interested in ensuring they have up-to-date information relating to other companies constantly look for that updated information. One finds that some lending institutions and due diligence companies hit our systems constantly. Other companies have licence agreements with us whereby they buy the data in bulk from us, both in information and images, and they get an uploaded dump of information from us daily. They in turn sell it on, repackaged and sliced, in a package that is of use to those persons to whom they sell information for various reasons, be it legal or lending institutions or people interested in making investments in companies who need up-to-date information. The volume of searches on our systems is absolutely vast.

I am not sure if that answers the question specifically, but it would be very difficult to give accurate numbers. They are huge. I have heard it said that ours is the second most busy website or system in the State after the Revenue Commissioners. That may not be the case but the volume of traffic on our systems is absolutely huge.

With regard to fees, I am not sure I understood the question. I was trying to write down the information relating to the searches. However, the fees are set in the fees order. There are various fees orders. They are set in legislation and are set at a rate that simply covers the cost. We cannot be seen to make a profit from searches that are made on the system. Does that address the question? I am not entirely sure I got it right.