Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

Reference was made to targets being imposed on people. Unless we get to the stage of individual services deciding their own budgets, there will be an ultimate level of resource. Sitting before the Committee on Budgetary Oversight, I assume that it is not seen as a negative to try to live within the resource. It is a question of making the best use of the resource we have and, given the demands facing us, determining whether we are prioritising and giving that resource to patients, families and service users as best we can. That is what we seek to do. We would like to, and could usefully, spend more on home support than we have this year, but there has also been a substantial extra investment of €150 million in home support in the past three or four years. More would be appropriate and of good value to the economy. The fundamental issue is that we have a budget of approximately €450 million for home support, which supports approximately 53,000 people across nearly 18 million hours.