Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 23 September 2021

Public Accounts Committee

Financial Statement 2020 and Related Matters: HSE (Resumed)

10:20 am

Photo of Catherine MurphyCatherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

It would be useful to get a list of those notices and to understand what issues they are addressing.

On another issue, in the Comptroller and Auditor General's report - again, this relates to the 2016 audit - Enable Ireland is the organisation at hand and a breakdown is given of the amount paid right across the country. Kildare and west Wicklow, which would have a population of approximately 250,000 and a disproportionately young population with new needs, does not have a history of having organisations already in place because it is a growing area. I note, however, that it got one of the lowest amounts of money in that distribution model. Mayo, for example, got €888,000, with Kildare and west Wicklow getting €83,000. There may well be a good reason for that. I do not think there is any part of the country that could boast that it has an exceptional service because they will always be stretched. However, is there an objective resource allocation model for the delivery of services? When it came to, for example, the distribution of new staff around the time of the crash, where there was a relaxation of the embargo on recruitment of staff - for example, speech and language therapists and other therapists - Kildare in fact got a disproportionate number relative to the rest of the country because it was so deficient and the staff were distributed on an objective resource allocation model. Is that the model or is it just that there is an offering coming from services?

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