Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

On the sections 38 and 39 question, that funding is within the total budget of the mental health service as typically reported. The figure is around €77 million for section 38 and section 39 bodies combined which includes suicide prevention.

The budget for mental health in the 2017 service plan is €867.8 million. We do not have a final budget for 2018, the service planning process is still underway, the draft figure is about €918 million, but that is subject to the service plan being finalised.

Agency spend is in excess of €30 million, I think it is €35 million. Typically, though not always, it is on medical agencies. That is the area where we have the greatest difficulty but there will be some parts in other areas. We can provide more information on that if required.

On budgeting down to lower levels, the HSE's financial regulations allows and provides for budgets to be delegated to whatever level is deemed most appropriate, there is no principle issue with delegating budget and responsibility further down.

On whether we feel we have effective responsibility, if the definition of effective responsibility is having that split specifically by all those different specialties, then we do not because we do not have that split. Given the constraints of the systems we have, we would say that yes we do have effective accountability. There is nothing to be complacent about, and it can always be improved on. Do we know and do we agree and have we been saying that the HSE required a single integrated financial system, since before it was even established? Yes, we absolutely have. We have also said that it requires a single HR and electronic health records system. This year we secured funding to sign a contract to actually implement a single national financial integrated system and we expect to get the same in the area of HR. In the meantime, we are progressing with what we can, which is the community costing exercise, so we can take different views at a CHO level if required. It is something we wish to do but we have a subspecialty view of what the outputs are per month, per team, for all the clinical community teams and for all the outputs in terms of what is going through our residential units. That visibility, in terms of the accountability question, is there. We do not have all the information that we would like to have but we are working to get it.