Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

There is certainly more focus on enhanced financial management control this year. Clearly, the position we ended up in last year does not do anybody a service and is not sustainable. The directorate of the HSE, as it was at the start of this year, decided that its first priority in implementing the service plan was to maximise the safety of the services we could deliver within the budget, and then to make the other improvements that we could without breaching that first priority. We have been working on that for some time. The new CEO has added an additional focus to that. He has been very clear that we cannot spend money we do not have and that the route to sustainable investment is to demonstrate we can live within the resources, albeit this can be difficult. Our aim is to tighten and not to allow loosened controls as we move into the third quarter and particularly into the fourth quarter of the year. We will be growing our overall staffing this year but we are looking to do it in a way that is planned-----