Mr. Liam Woods:

With the Chairman's permission, I will take the other part of the Deputy's questions. On the number of nurses who have left, we can and will give the Deputy a report on nursing retirements. I know he is also referring to nurses who have left without retiring and I will talk to HR colleagues and see if we have anything on that. One of the challenges in that analysis will be that one of the big causes for leaving is movement to somewhere else as well, in normal times. I understand that the Deputy is not referring to that but I will certainly see what data we have that would point toward this. I think it would be usual that there would be exit questionnaires, as the Deputy referred to, or dialogue at least. We may therefore be able to tap into some of the reasoning behind that but there is not a system that does that as a singularity. Of course, half of the staff we are referring to will be in voluntary entities but again, we will have some data around that, particularly in retirement instances. We would also potentially have some data, if we can obtain it, on age of retirement which would be an indicator in terms of what the Deputy is referring to.

On the An Bord Altranais issue, I will follow up with HR colleagues; I was not aware of that. I am aware that under the existing legislation brought in earlier last year there is an exemption from registration fees for Covid response but I was not aware of that kind of delay. I will certainly follow up with my HR colleagues.