Vol. 452 No. 7
44 Dr. Upton asked the Minister for Justice, in view of her response to Parliamentary Questions 143 and 144 of 14 March 1995, and her response to Parliamentary Question 105 of 28 March 1995, if she will clarify her statement that information would not be made available without the expenditure of a disproportionate amount of time; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [6916/95]
The information requested in Parliamentary Questions Nos. 143 and 144 of 14 March 1995 could have been obtained only by a manual examination of thousands of individual prisoner records held in the prisons and places of detention and the subsequent collation of the data obtained.
As regards the information sought in Parliamentary Question No. 105 of 28 March 1995, as already stated in the reply, there is no single crime category of handbag snatching. When Garda statistics are being compiled, handbag-snatching is included in the general crime category "larceny from the person with aggravation". The number of cases involving handbag snatching, as opposed to other larcenies from the person with aggravation, could only have been obtained by gardaí manually checking investigation files in order to determine the information sought.
In both cases, because the particular information was not recorded centrally, it would have required special examination of thousands of files by prison staff and by gardaí. Given the other, more pressing demands on the time of Garda and prison staff, it was considered that the allocation of scarce staff resources to collating the information would be disproportionate.
