Mr. Jim Ryan:

It may be useful to say that, five years ago, we invested additional mental health funding in psychiatric nursing. We literally bought additional places in the third level colleges. We spend €6 million a year on doing that. That gives us an extra 130 nurses. It is a four-year cycle and 2020 was the first year in which we saw an additional benefit from that. That was about trying to increase the pool of people who were available. We have obviously had to work on the process. As Ms O'Kelly has said, we have tried to reduce the length of time from one stage to another. The pool bit is very important because that increases the numbers coming through from the colleges.

We have also invested in 40 additional postgraduate psychiatric nursing positions every year. What we are trying to do is make sure that when we put in new developments nationally, which we have spoken about, whether it is Sharing the Vision, A Vision for Change etc., because many of those posts tend to be at promotional level and we denude our basic care level, there are people coming out of college who are able and willing to take up those posts. Interestingly, our west of Ireland services tend to find it easier to recruit staff nurses.