Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. I do not necessarily agree with my colleague. I believe they are setting out the facts as they are and I very much appreciate what they have set out here. I have one or two questions - I apologise in advance but I have to speak in the Seanad in a few minutes - on the €800 million, which is going to the section 39 organisations. We heard this morning that up to 80% of the funding goes to salaries in these organisations. I do not believe that is correct as I do not imagine that amount of funding of the €800 million is being paid in salaries. Does the Department have any idea of the amount going towards salaries currently?

The other issue is that the figure we were talking about this morning was around 12,000. We are talking about 2,200 organisations. I presume the number, in real terms, between all the organisations is greater than 12,000 so I wonder if the Department has a full audit of what numbers are employed, either part-time or whole-time equivalents, in the organisations? Have we ever actually done an audit and looked for all that information to be compiled? I know the HSE has that information available in relation to all the staff employed in the various different units around the country, and rightly so. Could we get the figure of the number employed in all of these 39 organisations? There is a large number of people working in the section 39 organisations on a voluntary basis. Do we have any idea of that?

I refer to the cost of the increase. I raised the question of pro rata, across the board, increase this morning. I know the employees of section 39 organisations are not considered to be in the same category as HSE employees but, in fairness to them, they are at the front line, they are providing a service and, in many cases, they providing a very difficult service with a huge amount of dedication and commitment required. We need to look after the section 39 organisations in the same way as we look after the other sections of the HSE. For instance, I raised the issue this morning of an extra 2,000 staff taken on in administration and management between December 2014 and April 2017. If there was the samepro rataapproach in looking after the section 39 organisations, maybe we might have had a little more balance about the number we took on in relation to the section 39 organisations. That is what I am talking about in relation to funding. Did the Department look at this issue and say that if we do not look after the people at the coalface, then there will be consequences? I am not saying we should not have recruited people in administration. I have no difficulty with that but I think that the same pro rataapproach was not taken with the section 39 organisations.

We all knew there was only a certain pot of money available for the health service. Whether one is employed by the HSE, a section 38 organisation or a section 39 organisation, surely there must have been a policy decision to take the same approach that ball boats rise together. Instead we seem to have a situation where certain boats were able to rise and others were not. Has the Department or the HSE looked at that? Since section 39 organisations did not get an increase in funding in real terms, they were not able to recruit the same number of administration and management staff recruited by the HSE. On top of that, and I accept there are many more services now compared to 2010, Tusla is now providing services previously provided by the HSE and it took over 500 administrative staff as well. I am just looking for answers as we look at the health service. We need to look at all areas in a proportionate way. We need to look at it from the point of view of making sure that people at the front line, who are providing a very valuable service the HSE itself is not able to provide, are not left paddling their own canoe in trying to provide those services and hold on to staff because they cannot give the same rate of pay. These are fundamental issues that need to be tackled and delivered on within a very short timeframe.