Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is good news. There is now a very small percentage waiting to be paid. It is the nature of these things that we do not tend to hear from the many who have been paid; we tend to hear from those who have not been paid because, quite rightly, there is a small number and they deserve to be paid.

It is very good news. Some €208 million has been distributed. That is a huge amount of money. I asked the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, for it to be a tax repayment and the Minister agreed. Colleagues will be aware that it is a rare thing indeed for a Minister for Finance to agree to agree to anything being tax free, but in this case he did. If we look around the world at similar recognition payments that have been made, Ireland's recognition payment is very favourable by international standards. The sum of €1,000 was given tax free to a very wide group of people.

I am very happy to say that the HSE has distributed €88 million. The section 38 organisations have received €52 million and the section 39 organisations have received €67 million. A total of €208 million has been distributed. Within the HSE, 142,250 staff have been paid. That breaks down to nearly 90,000 HSE staff and a little over 52,000 section 38 staff. If there are people left who have not been paid, they are local anomalies and there is a mechanism in place for them to be paid.

In terms of the non-public sector, that did take longer. As we discussed previously, I intervened directly with the HSE after one of the committee meetings we had here. The HSE was taking a cautious approach. None of us complained about it taking a cautious approach because if the HSE got anything wrong, we would be calling for it to come in to the Committee of Public Accounts or this committee to account for the fact that it had given some organisation too much money or it had done something wrong. The HSE was looking to do a very detailed validation of the amount of money these organisations were meant to get before it paid it out. I intervened, because I shared with you, Chair, and with colleagues my frustration at how long it was taking. What I said to the HSE is that it should ask the organisations to do it on a self-assessment basis and then to validate afterwards. Essentially, the HSE should tell all of the organisations what the rules are and ask them to come back indicating how many people qualify at which point the HSE would send them the money. In doing that, we have to accept that errors will be made but then the HSE is going to validate the payments afterwards. That is why the process accelerated towards the end of last year. To date, 727 funding applications have been received and 655 of those have been processed. There are still some left, but very few in the context of the number of people who are being paid.

Some 90% of the submissions that came back had errors in them that the HSE then needed time to go back and work through with the organisations. That is where it is at. The Dublin Fire Brigade and the prison nurses were the other groups that I asked to be included. The money was sent to those line Departments some time ago, certainly last year. To the best of my knowledge, we are no longer involved in the payment of members of the Dublin Fire Brigade and the prison nurses. I have not heard anything back about that money not being allocated. I would imagine it has been allocated but if there are issues, members should by all means bring them to me or the line Departments. The money certainly left the Department of Health some time ago.