Mr. Owen Keegan:

My point is that we are having difficulty in Dublin City Council just keeping the staff we have.

We welcome funding and sanctions for more staff but to be honest we would like to just keep the staff we have. I was asked if there is one thing that would help. One flexibility we had in the past is that when we were recruiting people from outside, particularly professional staff, we could give them incremental credit for years of service. Back in about 2014 we lost that power so if someone comes in from the outside they go right back to the start of the scale. We are very uncompetitive, therefore. We set up panels now and we get high refusal rates. We are running competitions-----