Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We provide the budget and the HSE is then in charge of recruitment. As I said, work in this area is undertaken in close co-operation with Dr. Niazi, who, with his team, looks after recruitment for the clinical programmes. They have been working very hard to recruit staff in this area.

Representatives from the HSE would probably provide more succinct answers on recruitment for the Deputy. There have been challenges with recruitment and retention for many years. I am frustrated with the time it takes to recruit people into posts and because they may not be released quickly to take up those posts if there is a requirement to backfill previous roles. That can cause challenges. For example, we recently filled a psychology position in Wexford. That recruitment process took almost 18 months, and we were lucky to get a psychologist in place there. It is frustrating for local areas to be without the person who is going to be the team leader in an area, be that a psychologist or psychiatrist. It can be very difficult to recruit into specific areas, however, and recruitment for the post I referred to was escalated the whole way up to the HSE chain of command to ensure that person could be put in place. I am delighted to say that psychologist is now in place.