Mr. Jim Breslin:

Obviously the first priority is to answer the parliamentary question. What we do periodically is that the research until drills down into the data to identify the policies that the clusters of questions relate to. For example, we have talked a great deal today about home care. We are pretty confident that if we move home care towards a statutory basis that the public clearly understands and can see the rule set, the number of questions would diminish. We see from the fair deal scheme that the number of questions diminished once we did that compared with previously. That would help us prioritise policy development. In addition, when individual cases are aggregated it could indicate a performance issue. As people ask questions around therapies and waiting times for them, not only do we rely on the HSE's performance information telling us how things are going but as the Department looks periodically at the parliamentary questions, we also would be able to say we are seeing a pattern. To the absolute credit of Deputies, there are always nuggets of parliamentary questions that shed a light on something, which is a cause of surprise to us. Not that there is an aggregate, but one question will tell us that there is something that we did not know. The civil servants in the Department are encouraged not just to do the parliamentary questions in order that we get an answer for the Member but to use it as part of their own understanding of the services they are interacting with and to challenge people using the information they are getting from the parliamentary question process.