Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister can take it that there will be no unwillingness on the part of members of the committee. The funding targeted for waiting list reduction initiatives is €75 million. Will the Minister give us a breakdown indicating where that funding will be spent?

On the robust monitoring system that will be put in place, again, I go back to the stretched income targets. This is something I raised in November and December 2016 and January, February, March, June and September 2017 and I would be forgiven for thinking I was being ignored. Once again, RTÉ has come to the rescue and will highlight issues that very often are raised here but do not receive much attention. Will the robust monitoring system include monitoring of consultants who are paid but who not on the specialist register? Are there proposals in that regard? There is a serious issue which I raised with Ms Rosarii Mannion when she appeared before the committee. I asked whether there were people - I do not know if I can use the term "consultant" - who were being paid a consultant's salary and who in the next few weeks or months would find themselves in the legal position of where they would have an entitlement to a contract of indefinite duration. The fact is that there are such individuals. One could not dispute that and it is an ongoing problem. Last night we became aware that in some instances consultants were not where where they were supposed to be. It involves a minority of them. Ms Mannion told us that qualified colleagues could oversee the work of those being paid the consultant's rate but that they were not eligible to be entered on the specialist register. It strikes me that there are several holes in the system. If people are in work, they should be doing the work they are supposed to be doing. We see that it happens in a minority of cases. How are the people who are picking up the slack back at the ranch, some of whom are not eligible for entry to the specialist register but who are being paid at the consultant's rate, to be supervised? To be fair to Ms Mannion, she seemed to be hanging all of her hopes on that happening. I would not have any faith in that regard, but it seemed to pass for a strategy in the HSE to deal with what was a very serious issue.

There are a number of competing issues, all of which will need to be monitored. Will the Minister outline how that monitoring will take place and who will be involved in it? When we can expect to see the results published? As someone who represented workers in the health service for many years, I can tell the Minister that if staff in other grades were late for or absent from work, it would not be tolerated. Even if someone was absent from work for a very good reason, he or she would still have to account for himself or herself. I will resist any effort to throw a minority under the bus to deflect attention from this issue because what we saw last night had its origins in Government policy. It is the natural outworking of Government policy.