The DPP's office deals well with an inexorably rising caseload, files containing basic errors and a dissatisfied public which blames the office for matters outside its control.
The picture painted in the Department of Finance report on the DPP's office, published yesterday, is of a relatively small group of legal and administrative staff coping remarkably well with an overloaded criminal prosecution system which is neither transparent nor accountable.
However, the portrait of the gardai involved in preparing crime investigation files for submission to the DPP is less favourable. While some files sent to the DPP are "impeccably prepared", others are "very unsatisfactory", containing "elementary errors" including wrong dates, missing statements and typing errors.
The review of the office followed requests for additional staffing by the DPP and began in 1995. These requests came from an office which had an 81 per cent increase in staffing over the previous 4 1/2 years, seven times the Civil Service average and the fastest growth rate for any Civil Service organisation during that period.
In September 1996 the office was staffed by the DPP, Illegal assistants in three different grades, 16 administrative staff and a laboratory technician.
The caseload statistics for the office, however, reveal the reason for the dramatic increase in staffing. From 3,849 incoming files in 1990, the office received 6,674 in 1996. The number of files on more complex and labour intensive cases, such as rape and sexual assault, increased dramatically over the period.
Those drawing up the report considered the confusion and helplessness felt by crime victims or suspects awaiting a decision by the DPP as to whether there would be a prosecution.
There was no single place for people to get information inn progress towards such a decision and this situation, the report implies, is no longer good enough. "Citizens and their public representatives today are far less willing than heretofore to accept, answers to the effect that the matter is in hand."
The report says that the narrowness of the role of the DPP means that much criticism directed towards the office is unfair. "It is important, in this context, to emphasise what the DPP does not do", it says.
"Unlike offices such as District Attorney, Examining Magistrates or Public Prosecutors, which may be better known to citizens through films or television stories concerning other jurisdictions, the DPP has no investigative role in relation to crime. This is a source of a very common public misapprehension."
"The main function of the office is to examine files, almost always submitted by, or on behalf of the gardai . . . to see if a case is a proper one for prosecution ... The DPP has tried on several occasions to raise public understanding of his role, but to no avail."
A statement from the Taoiseach yesterday accompanying the report emphasised the positive good progress had been made towards ensuring that an annual DPP's report was published; computer facilities in the office were being expanded and upgraded; and a "Statement of Strategy" for the office, covering 1997 to 2000, was being prepared.
It is hoped that the first annual report will be published next June.
It is intended to provide details of what occurred, to the approximately 6,800 files which will have passed through the office; how many prosecutions went for trial and before which courts; and it will categorise the crimes in respect of which prosecutions were considered.
Finally, Mr Bruton said, the interaction between the office of the DPP and other agencies involved in the prosecution of offences is among the issues under consideration by the High Level Review Group on the Law Offices of the State, which is being chaired by the Attorney General. This body was set up last October and is to report to the Government within four months.