Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

That would be to reassure people because Aer Lingus and some airline companies did some good work on putting on special flights to China and so forth at the time. It is hard to prepare for every emergency but if one thing emerged from that pandemic, it showed that western Europe was caught out and we need to be more prepared in future.

I have a couple of final questions. On home care, the budget and the number of hours have been increased, all of which are welcome. We want to try to keep more people at home. There are problems arising in the nursing home sector which clearly point to this. The demographic trend is that people are living longer and they want to stay at home. Some 99 out of 100 elderly people will say that they would prefer to be kept in their own home for as long as possible.

I understand there are problems with recruitment. The service is provided directly by HSE staff, by what used to be termed home helps and by agency staff. As an observation, based on my own contemporaries, the agencies have a job in retaining staff and perhaps the HSE does too. On the issue of costs, and in answer to parliamentary questions I have submitted over the years to which I have often had difficulty in getting a direct answer, where it might take a couple of parliamentary questions, these replies confirm that agency staff cost more to the HSE than directly-employed HSE staff. This was contained in the answers I received on three occasions over the past 12 years. On that issue, how much effort is being put into recruiting directly-employed HSE staff for home care?