Mr. Jim Nugent:

The Central Remedial Clinic, CRC, has access to funding through its activities, which have been going on for many years. There is no harm in stating at the outset that for the first 25 years of the clinic's work, there was no State funding whatsoever. All salaries for clinical staff, administrative staff and others were paid from public contributions in one form or another. At that time, many other institutions were doing this, such as, for example, the Rehab Group and the Mater, which were involved in the process of running their own lotteries and pools as a methodology of raising money to meet the expenses of the organisations. In the case of the Central Remedial Clinic, we started to get State funding in 1977 and at that, it was not 100% State funding. This build-up was common enough and obviously, at the time, I understood it was greatly appreciated that the State had started to help because of the nature of the work and its specialisation. It is a highly complex business and in that context, it is very expensive to run.

The development of salaries evolved over time. The people concerned were employed by a private company in the technical sense. The salaries were under an employment contract and therein lies the legacy of our responsibility as a company to the employee. In the case of Mr. Kiely, whatever way the salary built up is one thing but the issue was that when 2009 arrived and we came to 1 January 2010, the HSE at that time indicated the salary it was willing to pay, which was €106,000. The balance was met from funds we have earned through the lotteries. Those funds are significant and over many years have built up into substantial amounts of money. In the first instance, we have used them in the support of the services of the clinic in so far as we can and there are a couple of points I wish to make in that regard. The fund primarily has been used as capital development funds. For example, in recent years we have built a new service centre in Waterford, which is a state-of-the-art operation. The funds we have at present, for example, are earmarked for the CRC in Clondalkin and Scoil Mochua, as well as for a day centre in Swords that has been in preparation for five years and about which we have been waiting to conclude arrangements with the HSE. As these developments take time, we always ensure those funds are managed by appropriate and responsible agencies. The board of the CRC assigns the funds to appropriate institutions to take care of those funds. In building up those funds, it effectively is a reserve we can use from time to time.

There was criticism regarding the issue of service cuts in the Central Remedial Clinic. The Deputy must remember that when a child comes the clinic, he or she is not there just for a short time visit as would be the case were one being admitted into a general hospital, where one might go in for a procedure and then come out and recover and then everything is fine. Our children are with us pretty well for a lifetime and we must think about that. If there are cuts - which there must be in times like this and we have no argument with the HSE about that - we try the best we can to find alternative sources of funding. It is as plain as that. If we could put more money into the day-to-day service, we would but one must have staff to provide a day-to-day service. We have an employment embargo, which we also must accept and we do not have any hang-ups about it. We are stretching the organisation to the very limits at present because of the level of staff reduction that has taken place, while also trying to keep up the service. One cannot simply tell people they had better go home because one has just run out of money. A balancing act is going on constantly and as part of that, to carry out the transition from 2010 to the present, given we already had five or six people who were on a higher salary than the new salaries determined but who were contractually there for us to manage, we have made a reduction, wherever possible. From approximately 11 senior management staff, we are down to approximately five at present and two more will be retiring over the next year or so. Again, they either will be replaced if the HSE agrees we can replace them or we will be obliged to find an alternative way of doing our business. However, we will not be breaking the level of pay, which will be determined from the 2010 arrangement. It is a transition period and we are doing it through natural reduction. We cannot simply walk in and tell someone we are sorry but we are going to take away half that person's salary away from him or her because we have been told to so do.