Mr. John Hogan:

Our current staffing cohort at the end of October is 337 and a half. We have 37 members of staff seconded into the Department. It may be helpful to give some sense of these because it varies between people from the Office of the Attorney General who have been seconded in to work directly with us, to people from Revenue, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the CSO, and from the credit review office. We have a secondee in from UK Treasury and we have a number of people who are working actively on some of the banking issues in response to the banking review last year. We have secondees from the CCPC and from the Central Bank. Then, of course, we have our NTMA secondees within the shareholder financial advisory division headed by Des Carville who is here today.

The Deputy raised the issue of secondees from some of the larger organisations and particularly in the instance we saw in Australia. We have not had secondees of that nature for quite some time in the Department. She is right that we have built up expertise both from what we have imported from the NTMA but also by actively looking at the secondments from other Departments. We used to do a lot of our recruitment through the PAS system but we have taken the initiative over the last 12 months to go directly and advertise as the Department of Finance in the marketplace and we have got really good people in as a result of that at AP level. We will continue to do that because there is a particular brand associated with the Department, which is quite positive. People want to come and work with us. There are exciting opportunities opening up over the next two years, not least as we begin to plan for the EU Presidency which Ireland will take over in the second half of 2026. This is going to be mean quite a lot of pressure on the Department and we will need to expand and plan accordingly to service this. As I recall, the last time we had secondees in from those big four firms was probably ten years ago. Some of the work that secondees in from the private sector have done over the years has been really important and fruitful. I can think of two pieces of work in particular, and they would have been familiar to the group here. One was dedicated work by an expert from one of the big four firms that resulted in a report on mortgage arrears and charted a path for the Government's response to the mortgage crisis 12 or 15 years ago. It introduced recommendations around things like the reform of the personal insolvency legislation, the introduction of mortgage to rent, and special supports for borrowers, and we see the fruits of that even currently around the existing Abhaile scheme. One of the recommendations was that this reform of the personal insolvency legislation and we took somebody from one of the legal firms to work actively on that. This was crucial in focusing our attention on what was quite an innovative approach to the development of personal insolvency legislation. When people come in, they sign the Official Secrets Act so there is that discipline from those secondees that come in, so we are confident in the way we manage that.