The chairman of the Fennelly Commission, which was set up to review the recording of phone calls at garda stations, has said it "would not be feasible in any reasonable timeframe" to examine all of the tapes it has uncovered.
In a letter sent to the Taoiseach's office last November, Mr Justice Nial Fennelly said it could take "years, if not decades" to listen to all of the recordings.
Figures provided to the Department of the Taoiseach by the commission indicate that actual duration of the recordings may be well in excess of one million hours in duration.
The material was recorded at more than 20 garda stations from 1995 to 2013.
The commission, which was set up by the Taoiseach last April, wrote to the Taoiseach's office in November seeking an extension to its timeframe, which was later granted.
However, the letter also included a broad scope of the material it had encountered.
A copy of the chairman's letter has been uploaded to the department's website.
In that 50-page letter, Mr Justice Fennelly said that one batch of the tapes, which were recorded between 1995 and 2008, consisted of 3,000 digital audio tapes (DAT), each with the capacity to hold 320 hours of recordings.
Based on those figures, the DAT cassettes alone may contain up to 960,000 hours or tape recordings.
In relation to a later batch of tapes, recorded using different technology called NICE, Mr Justice Fennelly said that it was "likely that it will also run to many years in duration".
There was also just four specially-equipped machines in existence on which these 3,000 DAT tapes could now be replayed on, according to the commission.
This is because the tapes were recorded using a dedicated encoding system, which was unique to An Garda Síochána.
If the cassettes were recorded to their maximum capacity, then it would take 27 years to play all of the DAT recordings simultaneously and in real-time, even if all four machines were used.
At the time of writing the letter to the Taoiseach's office, the commission said it was looking at a sampling mechanism for reviewing the contents of the tapes. It would only be in a position to determine what resources it would require to carry out further work on the recordings after this initial sampling exercise was done.
The commission said the tapes had been collated by An Garda Síochána but not listened to, so it was impossible to be precise about the exact duration of the DAT or NICE tape recordings in full.
The commission's terms of reference does allow for it to examine a sample of the material it uncovers.
The commission also said that it expects to call a minimum of 150 gardaí, retired gardaí and lay persons for interview in order to examine who authorised and accessed the recordings.
It is also tasked with examining any recording which might relate to the recording of solicitor-client phone calls.
As part of this work, the commission gave details of a pilot project it carried out which was aimed at cross-referencing the inventory of recorded calls at one garda station with the official custody record for that station - to see whether there are any suspicious crossovers between the two.
However, the scale of the recordings was also an issue in relation to this aspect of the commission's work, according to the letter.
The commission's legal team has estimated that processing of one year's custody records in one garda station in order to identify calls involving lawyers and their clients would take approximately 170 hours or over four weeks.
The commission went on to say that given the recordings cover a 13-year period - and that there are 23 stations under review - by a simple calculation it would take 24 years for the commission to review all of this material.
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