Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

The work on the full CD-ROM was finished in 1998. The error was only discovered last year by an official working in the section and it then took the office some time to ascertain the precise scale of the problem. This has all been done. Obviously, the officials have been back and forth with Juta Publishing Limited, the South African firm which did all of the work on this. In the main, international people worked on the project because it was the first time we had done a job like this.

Recently, as I stated in my reply, the office has been making use of the Centre for Management Organisation and Development, CMOD, of the Department of Finance to put forward a short to medium-term solution. This has led the office to use a legal publishing company here to advise on the matter, which is what is happening at present. A quotation document was issued to seven legal publishing companies and two responses were received by the October deadline. Following the evaluation of the quotations received, it was recommended that Thomson Round Hall be requested to produce the report, subject to a contract. I understand the contract has not yet been completed.

It has been established that this problem is soluble and it is a question of cost. The office had already enforced a penalty on the South African company previously, of approximately €130,000, for some other outstanding work. However, it is co-operating in this regard and will co-operate with Thompson Round Hall in the preparation of the report to find a resolution to this matter.

This morning, I asked staff in the Office of the Attorney General when they thought this process would get under way. They hope it will get underway in January, immediately after Christmas, in order to rectify the difficulty as outlined by Juta Publishing Limited and the legal reporting company which has been engaged to correct the problems.

See this speech in context