Mr. Noel Waters:

I accept the Deputy's point. That is a concern for us, as it is a concern for all colleagues in other Departments regarding people who are overpaid. Both in the Prisons Vote and the Department's Vote, one of the difficulties is that the regulations governing sick leave were changed so that now people move on to half-pay after three months of sick leave. Our systems are slow in catching up with that. We are also moving or have moved some of our payrolls. Up to recently, these were all done by my colleagues' operation in Killarney, but we are now moving into a public service payroll centre. We are working with them to ensure we reduce those overpayments to the minimum and, crucially, that we have repayment plans in place for everybody. We are not happy with a situation where people have been overpaid for whatever reason, through payroll error or inputting information, and it is left to gather and there are no repayment plans in place. One of our key objectives is to ensure we have repayment plans.