Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for being here today. It is the first opportunity for us with all of them present to acknowledge what has taken place over the past two years. Some of the witnesses were more visible in the battle against Covid than others. That speaks to the hundreds of thousands of people in the HSE, in particular, those working in hospitals and as carers. I acknowledge that now that we have a little bit of distance from Covid, although it is far from over.

I will be tougher than Deputy Murphy. I will not give the witnesses multiple choice options. I will speak about reports in February 2022 with regard to additional funding being provided by Government for mental health services. A recording took place by officials in preparation for an internal departmental budgetary meeting. It is an alarming prospect, given the cyberattack that happened last year, that illegal recordings can take place within the Department. I am interested to hear about that. There certainly was a view in the reporting that the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, had almost recklessly allocated additional funding and that there was no real attempt at departmental level to try to spend the money in that year. There was a very cavalier attitude to how that additional money had been arrived at and that there was no basis for it. There also seemed to be no urgency as to how it might be spent. With the witnesses having been given time to reflect on what happened, do they think that was a fair representation of the attempts by the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, to try to allocate additional money for CAMHS? My understanding is that those requests came from service-delivery elements of the HSE and this was not a notional figure dreamed up by a Minister of State seeking headlines, which was certainly the tone of the reporting.