Ms Fiona Tierney:

I will reply to the Deputy's questions in order. In terms of the practice in other European countries, to my knowledge, the recruitment services in England follow the same process of having panels of appointment to various different bodies. I can check the situation in Scotland and Wales for the Deputy, if he is interested.

The issue of extending or closing panels does not generally arise. A panel can be exhausted because we have been good at determining how many vacancies there will be and having that number of people on the panel, so within 18 months all those vacancies will be filled. Everybody will be gone from the panel. It could also be because, as Deputy Kirk mentioned earlier, some external events occur and the panel, effectively, becomes closed because we are not recruiting any more. There could also be an area where there is a particular demand for specialist skills. For example, we have had lots of requests for accountants across public service bodies. We will recruit and place people on a panel and wait for the sanctioned vacancies to become available. If, after an 18-month period, there are still people on the panel and we have not had requests to fill vacancies, we would ask if the panel is moving and look at our workload, the demands for the client and what is happening in the general environment. We would consider whether there had been other competitions in a similar area that would offer people an opportunity to join the public service and make an assessment on when to run a new competition. That is generally what happens.

The question of extending a panel does not really arise. We do not use the language of saying the panel is closed. It can be misconstrued by clients when we might advise them that given the last time a competition was held was two years ago, there might be more people in the market who would be interested in applying or qualified for this panel, it might be time to move on and have a new competition. We do not generally use language like "it is closed".

I was asked about medical tests. For many positions in the Civil Service and public service, once candidates are on a panel, they have met all the selection criteria. They then have to go through what I referred to in my statement as the clearance process, including checking current employer references, doing Garda vetting and completing a medical test. That process with the Garda Síochána is handled by it. We would pass through the names of the assigned trainees and the Garda Síochána would organise their medical tests. The same applies for consultant positions with the HSE. We transmit the names to the HSE and it runs that area of clearance in doing the medical tests.