Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

As regards Deputy Rabbitte's first question, during the update process of the statutory instrument project it was established that a systematic error had occurred on a selection of data contained in the Acts and statutory instruments. The error was caused by the insertion of hyper-links, or direct clickable links, to reference parts of the Acts or statutory instruments during the process of creating the CD-ROM version of the Act in 1999. That caused some of the data to be overwritten. No errors have been located in the post-1998 data. It is a fact that technology systems throughout the world, and particularly in their start-up phase, are costly but one must start somewhere. Problems regularly arise when working through such systems. I am afraid that is par for the course in technology systems and has been for the last 25 years. Thankfully, they seem to get on top of them after a period and they work well. I am afraid, however, that the problem is not unique to this country. In this instance, people were brought in from abroad in the belief that they would have great solutions that had worked elsewhere. They also made mistakes, however, although admittedly only in some areas.

See this speech in context