Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As I said, the number of cases I referred to the independent review is quite large, and there is a wide variety of cases. I did originally say that the investigation would, I hoped, take a number of months, but in fact it is taking longer. One of the reasons it is taking longer, of course, is the complexity of some of the cases, the working through of the material and the amount of written material that has been supplied by individual complainants.

As I said, the counsel are working their way through the various cases and making recommendations. I will have a summary of those recommendations in the near future. It would have been anticipating the outcome of those cases if I had included them in the Guerin commission.

The legal advice when I was establishing the Guerin commission was that I would be unable to do that in advance of the outcome of the recommendations, because we would not quite know what was being referred if we did not have the outcome of the independent review of those cases. In that context, I was unable to include them in the terms of reference of the Guerin commission when I published it and I did not want to delay that further. However, as I have said, if a commission is recommended as a way forward for any of the cases referred to and being examined by the review commission, that is certainly a possibility.

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