Mr. Paul Lemass:

I will outline the role of the Department and the sanctioning role for recruiting new staff. I do not have the exact figures to hand but I believe the Department has sanctioned in the order of 700 to 800 staff in the area of housing in the past three to four years. Any requests that come in for additional staffing in these areas have been processed very quickly. We have very few on hand so that if a local authority identifies a resource gap, we do what we can to plug it and to accommodate it in that way. We are sanctioning staff.