Dr. John Hillery:

The Deputy asked why the recruitment is taking so long. There is another HSE committee, the CAAC. I do not know what it stands for but it is the consultant appointment committee. It is an important committee. It needs to look at whether a job is needed and what the job description should include. It goes across medicine and is not just in psychiatry. As I illustrated with an example earlier, when my colleague retired I was asked by one of my senior colleagues to draw up the job description with him. However, that was two months after she had retired. I fully support having committees that oversee things to ensure we are not wasting money or appointing the wrong type of consultant. However, surely that could happen a few years down the line, as Deputy Brassil suggested earlier. It is not about saying that we have too many committees; we probably do not have that many. However, there are hold-ups in the system that we should eliminate by starting earlier or else seeing if they can be freed up in some other way.