Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That may be the view of the Department of public expenditure and reform, or the view of an official. I can say that we worked closely with the HSE on some of these issues and some difficult decisions were made. The Deputy and his committee colleagues will be aware, for example, that when we reached 6,100 funded posts, we said the HSE had to stop. That is the same as happens in every school, Garda station and county council, here in the Oireachtas and in every business in the country. When you have hired the staff you are funded to hire, you have to stop hiring. That is perfectly normal. The Deputy will have seen that members of Fórsa are on a work to rule and are talking about escalating it as a result of the HSE stopping its recruitment when it had, in fact, exceeded its targets. The reality is that we have made difficult decisions with the HSE.