Ms Anne O'Connor:

I do not have a county breakdown of the allocation with me but we can get one for the Deputy and send it to him.

We have endeavoured to look at population in terms of how we allocate resources. Obviously, there is a historical allocation to services across the country. Since the division was introduced, we have been able to look at funding on a national basis for the first time. Prior to that, it was done on a geographical basis and we were never in a position to look at how one area compared with another. We have sought to do that over recent years in terms of matching resources to populations. There are different reasons for areas having more resources. For example, an area that had a number of old psychiatric institutions tends to have more resources available historically.

I will have to get the details of the population breakdown for CHO 1 but throughout the last few years we have looked at how we can increase the resources into those areas that are below average. We have used a deprivation rating scale, the Haase and Pratschke scale, for looking at how we can build population and demographic factors into resource allocation. That model is used within the HSE. We are incrementally trying to grow the areas that have been under-resourced, but we have a way to go on that. Ultimately, we have services that have been well funded historically and we cannot simply turn off services in areas where they exist. We must try to rebalance over time.