Mr. David Moloney:

I thank Deputy Durkan for his question. When we look across Government, one of the ways we have of monitoring expenditure is by requiring each spending area to produce profiles of the spend at the start of the year. It is against that profile of spend that we monitor. Once those profiles are built up based on an understanding of what is going to change in the year and an understanding of historical practices and previous experience, then they ordinarily provide a very accurate assessment, particularly of current day-to-day spending, that is, the spending that one has to do to hire people, payments that one makes, regular wages and so on, but maybe a little less so for capital and other types of lumpy spending which is a little more difficult to predict in terms of when, during a year, it might land. All Departments create those profiles and we maintain oversight of how accurate they are. Where the profiles are not accurate, we question that. Mr. Dormer might wish to talk specifically about health. Of course, in the case of health, particularly in recent years, we have had extraordinary events that have caused very significant in-year decisions, among other things.