Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

Certainly over the last number of years, we have experienced problems in different scheme areas, depending on the numbers who are claiming in different scheme areas. We have taken a whole range of different measures including trying to improve the technology that is at play, providing additional staff into those areas, diverting staff into them or looking at process improvements. I absolutely acknowledge that the area where we are under pressure is the illness-related schemes because of a number of different things, including the legal aspects that changed in accessing illness based schemes and also the need for the medical intervention, as I think I said in my opening statement. We now have improved our own capacity at medical assessor level so we are managing these and trying to address them and bring the figures down. They are not at the level I would like them to be at but in other instances where we have experienced those kinds of problems historically, we have been able to address them and bring the processing times down to what is a reasonable level, bearing in mind all the different things that have to be satisfied. We will be working to continue that.