Mr. Tony O'Brien:

A few months ago I might have given the Chairman a stock answer about the moratorium and it being a blunt instrument and so on, all of which would have been right at the time. On budget day things changed a little in that we are now moving into an environment which we are calling the funded workforce plan. There is less of a preoccupation with numbers and more of a preoccupation with value in that sense. The moratorium, as we knew it, does not exist. We can employ such and so many staff in the categories that we need to do so up to the level of staff that we can afford. This is not particularly relevant to Áras Attracta, but we have previously had an excessive dependence upon agency personnel at greater cost in order to sustain services while remaining within an overall cap. We are no longer in that environment.

In terms of the staffing requirement at Áras Attracta right now, some of that is being met through the good offices of some of the funded service provider agencies that we fund who have effectively loaned to us and rallied around to provide us with their qualified and appropriately regulated and registered staff while at the same time we have been recruiting additional staff. The latest figure is that we have successfully recruited nine additional staff. I am not sure if all those staff have been deployed but all the required slots are filled currently by different means. We have not allowed other considerations to get in the way of that.

On the Chairman's direct question on the impact of regulation, this particular sector has only been regulated for a little more than a year. It is not yet a mature regulatory process. It will mature and get stronger and better. In the context of the private sector, not the private health sector but the private commercial sector generally, there is a process around a regulatory impact assessment. That process does not apply in the same way in the public sector. For example, as appropriate regulation is introduced in order to improve services, particularly environmental and quality of service issues, it has a cost and that is not always taken into account. We have not hitherto been in a position to provide sufficient capital or revenue funding to some of the service providers to enable them to rapidly meet the emerging standards. This has been a feature in the care of the elderly in community nursing units, where there are a number of nursing units for which we do not have the capital funds to enable them to qualify and be registered. We need more capital funding if that is to be achieved. Similar issues apply in regard to the implementation of what is colloquially called the Christy report from 2011 around congregated settings and the registration requirements of the some of the existing facilities, even the ones in the community where there is work required to bring them up to full scratch. There is a challenge in that area, of which the Minister of State, Deputy Lynch, is very much aware on which she is working.