Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

My time is limited. There is a common theme to my questions. I welcome the additional money being invested and so on but what seem to be lacking are clear objectives for where this is heading. When figures are bandied around and we say an additional €1 billion is being thrown in here, and we say we are spending more than we have ever spent in the history of the State, which is a cliché at this stage because it is kind of inevitable that we would spend more than we had ever spent in the past, the question is what it will deliver and what the objective is, although perhaps there is none.

Is there an objective to reach, for example, what is considered best practice in terms of bed occupancy and capacity headroom or is it just that figures on additional allocations are being thrown around but we are not quite sure what that will mean for the end result? Similar questions relate to staffing levels and so on. Are there clearly specified targets that will increase capacity, where clear deficiencies have been identified, up to levels that will address those deficiencies and allow us to clear the waiting lists - it is back to waiting lists again - because we will have the capacity? Have the targets and objectives been worked out to that degree? My suspicion is that they have not and while there is just some additional investment, it is not clear what that additional investment will yield us at the end of the day.