Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I want to touch on accountability. There is a lot of talk of clinicians being held to account.

Take the example of a multi-billion euro organisation in the private sector in which the chief executive and his or her team reports to the board every year. If they were overspending by €600 million to €700 million per year and that did not stop, the chief executive and his or her financial team would be fired. That is what would happen. Given that the overspend has been in excess of half a billion euro per year for the last five years has anybody in the Department or the HSE lost his or her job due to these ongoing massive annual overspends?