Mr. Denis Murphy:

If I may give the Deputy a sense of our figures, each quarter we submit - as all institutes are required to do - staff statistics to the HEA. Across the institute, the figure we submitted for December 2016, which would have been the last quarter, was of the order of 1,780 full-time equivalents. That is not the exact figure but it is approximately 1,780, and the number of people that represents is just under 2,200. To answer the Deputy's question, there are 400 or 500 people who would not be full-time. They are converted into full-time equivalents to give us the figure of 1,780. That is the proportion in the context of our overall staffing.

Like all the institutes, we are working through the implementation of the Cush report. We are in constant discussion both with the Department and with the staff representatives on that. I suggest that we are relatively complete in terms of the implementation of the conversions that were agreed on converting part-time staff to more secure employment. There are some outliers that we are having discussions with but we are working through the stages. There are a number of stages to that process but we are working through them and working with our partners in doing so.