Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

We dealt with the improvements in hospital waiting lists at the start, and I can go over them again if the Deputy wishes. To use the disability figures over the period that Ms Hoey indicated, if I understood them correctly, roughly 1,400 is the number of those 20,000 we would have lost over that period. To get to a net additional 1,600, I think Ms Hoey said, we have to recruit over that period 3,000, so 3,000 staff were recruited, we lost 1,400 and the net increase is 1,600. That is substantial. To put that in the context of the entire health service, the HSE and all the section 38 organisations, we have grown the service with Government investment by approximately 18,000 personnel since January 2020. We have lost 9,000 or 10,000 a year. That means we have had to recruit approximately 48,000 staff over the past three years in order to have a net increase of 18,000. There has never been an organisation that has increased its recruitment capacity as much as we have. Have we a lot more to do? We absolutely do. We understand-----