Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

The CSSO has recruited mostly additional approved staff. The staffing complement has averaged about 225 over the past year. The office currently has 12 vacancies comprising one professional post, eight technical and three support staff posts.

Similarly, the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has recruited additional staff, as sanctioned, and currently has a serving staff complement of approximately 170 full time equivalents. I understand there are only one or two vacancies in the DPP's office, which are in the process of being filled. On the question of outsourcing, there is no reason for not contracting out legal work if the CSSO wants to do this. In the recent past it has contracted out some specific cases where the workload involved was beyond the capacity of the office to handle. It was not that it did not possess the technical expertise, but rather it related to the volume of work. The office has made extensive use of counsel, also, in dealing with its day to day case load.

As regards the DPP's office, more prosecution work is outsourced to barristers in private practice than in most other common law jurisdictions. The tendency in other common law jurisdictions is to make greater use of in-house lawyers, but the DPP's office still outsources a large amount of work to private practice.

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