Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Increasing better public services for people is not all about hiring more people to provide those public services. It is also about what we could do with efficiency and the output per person. That said, the number of people employed to provide public services, particularly in our front-line services, is a very big part of the equation. We have seen that over time, in line with a recovery taking place, we have been able to increase investment in the hiring of more public servants. For example, since the beginning of 2015, when the economy created the resources to do it, we have been able to hire more front-line public servants, including more people working in health, teachers, special needs assistants, SNAs, resource teachers and gardaí. Since that point, the number of people involved in front-line services has increased by 8,500 to 298,000, so there has been an increase in the number of people doing that work. If one looks at our current position for 2016, we expect we will have 306,800 people working in our public services, which is an increase of 8,600, so we are increasing the number of people working in front-line services, which is paid for by the steady increase in tax revenue that we discussed earlier on.