Dr. Anne-Marie Brooks:

Certainly, I can give some examples in the context of core funding. As the Deputy knows, core funding is in its second year and commenced in September 2022. In the first year of core funding, a number of concerns were raised by representative groups, particularly concerning small sessional services and the impact or value of core funding to services of that size. Arsing from that, and there was some very significant engagement with sector representatives, an independent financial review of sessional services was commissioned by the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, and Frontier Economics undertook that review. There were also changes introduced for year two of core funding to address the concerns raised by representative groups, particularly for small, sessional services, in that there was a flat rate allocation for sessional services in year two of core funding of €4,150. In addition to that, a core funding floor was introduced in year two of core funding, so no service gets less than €8,150.