Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

My question was had the Department set targets. It might have been quicker to say, "No".

As an aside, Ms Rothwell is welcome but her presence was not flagged to committee members in advance and was not referenced in any of the opening statements. I have some questions for her but we were not prepared or alerted to the fact she would be here and I assumed that there would not be a representative of University Hospital Waterford when I checked the opening statements prior to the meeting. If Deputies from Waterford had advance notice, they would have rearranged their schedules to be here. While we will have a separate session, I wanted to point that out. I do not mean any disrespect, but to say that, I had assumed there would be no representative here, although we had flagged that there might be discussion on University Hospital Waterford.

The issue of consultants who are not on the register is serious and we have discussed it previously. I had a detailed discussion on this with Ms Rosarii Mannionthe last time we had a session. I am still at a loss to know whether anything has been done to prevent this from happening. We are all aware of the rights and entitlements of a person to a contract of indefinite duration. An increasing number of consultants are engaged in specialist activity who are not on the specialist register and they are being paid as though they are on the register while fulfilling those roles. Every day that goes by they come closer to a legal and lawful entitlement to a contract of indefinite duration. Those conversions are just being repeatedly rolled over. I asked Ms Mannion about this on the previous occasion. I pressed her on it and I will ask again. I ask whoever responds not to go on a tour of the houses; if the answer is "No", that is fine. Is there any plan to deal with this issue? It has been raised in the courts and the officials do not need me to tell them it is a serious issue. Is a plan in place in advance of what has been done, because we can all agree that whatever was done in the past clearly has not worked because more consultants continue to be added to it? We all know how contracts of indefinite duration work. There are people who are currently on the road towards a contract of indefinite duration and the HSE will not be in a position to do them out of their rights, nor should it, but is there any plan to put qualified consultants in these posts?