Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

If one puts a file covering 25 million people in the post and does not register it, what does one expect? We never know what might be happening at any time. That is the point I am making.

Seriously, all these matters have been followed through. When I checked the position regarding the legal MAC and the number of cases current at any one time, I presumed that I would have been told there were, say, ten cases of actions against either statutory instruments or legislation of this House. When I was briefed on this matter last week, I saw from the briefing notes there are currently 340 cases. The huge volume of cases concerns me. Each of these cases concerns a constitutional action taken against the State, either constitutional actions against statutes that we put in place or statutory instruments. That number of cases shows the complexity of the work in that office and they account for only part of the work.

When dealing with these questions, I checked back to the last round of difficulties we had in 1994 to 1995 and noted the figures then as against now. The volume of litigation currently is extraordinary. I would be naive to say that it will cease. It puts enormous pressure on the system. The recommendations in the 1995 report were fully implemented and the then Attorney General, Dermot Gleeson, to his credit, undertook the first overhaul of that office and subsequent office holders have continued on that work and brought in a huge range of procedures. The volume of work and pressure in that office is enormous, given the volume of litigation. That is proper and people are entitled to take such actions, but the volume of work is high. Even though we have all these procedures in place, the number of cases is a concern. We have protocols as to how these cases are handled but there is the issue of sheer volume of cases in the Attorney General's office, the Chief State Solicitor's Office and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. We have implemented fully the recommendations of the Nally report, we have resolved the industrial relations and brought in the extra staff recommended. A large number of staff are now working in the office but the volume of cases is huge.

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