Ms Oonagh Buckley:

I fully appreciate that. The last thing we need for them is to be faced with us making a weak decision, and then being subject to judicial review. We will be working very hard to process those. Backlogs in public systems can be fixed in only two ways, really: either one makes the system more efficient, or one adds more resources to the system. We are trying to do both, basically. With the help of the Department, we have added more resources into the system, and we will get those resources up and running. Based on our experience with the three civil servants who arrived in January and are now making robust and legally reliable decisions day in, day out, I am fully confident that we will get the new board members up to speed extremely quickly. They will then be in a position to take those good, solid decisions as we go forward. We may not have cracked the backlog entirely by the end of the year, but we will be well over it. By quarter 1 of next year, the board should be back, roughly, to where it needs to be regarding equilibrium on its yearly intake.