Mr. Barry O'Brien:

From the perspective of certain grades, there was a requirement by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform that we should not continue to pay new beneficiaries while the review was ongoing. The reality of having theatre nurses and consultants on-call remained a reality in the day-to-day service delivery model. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform never envisaged a risk to service provision in reviewing allowances. The figure we have provided includes a portion of that but we focus on allowances formally approved and recognised for specific individual professional grades, which we submitted to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform as part of the allowance review.