Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that and know that Mr. Mulvany can detail all of the information. If he was running a coffee shop, a hospital, a health care system or anything else for which he had a budget, saw that he was spending over a certain amount a year and that it had jumped by a factor of two or three and stayed at that level, he would know that something had happened. Anyone in Ireland who is running a business, a nursing home or a charity would ask himself or herslef that question. He or she would say he or she was overspending by a bit, but now we are overspending by a huge sum and it has stayed there. Something has changed and we need to understand it.

I want to go through the chronology to understand how it happened. In 2017 the Dáil voted through a health budget, on the basis of which the HSE produced a national service plan which under legislation needs to fall within the budget allocated. In fairness to the HSE, at the front of that service plan it raised serious concerns about the risk of a potential overspend and here we are with an overspend of €700 million. When the national service plan was presented to the Minister for Health with all of the associated risks flagged, did he go back to ask the HSE to revise it to one that would deal with and make provision for the risks identified? Anyone watching this debate who is running a business, a charity or a GAA team anywhere in the country knows that when someone is budgeting and dealing with a chaotic world where unforeseen things happen, as they do in the health sector and everywhere else, they make provision for this. Anyone running a hospital knows that it is necessary to make provision for a certain amount of overtime to cover emergencies and so forth. The Dáil voted through a budget of over €14 billion. The national service plan produced for the Minister mentioned serious risks about the potential for an overspend. We now have that overspend. Was the HSE instructed to go back and come up with a budget that would make appropriate provision for the risks it had foreseen?