Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

What the Minister is kind of saying is that he is giving the minimum allocation that he can possibly give in order to put downward pressure on what the Minister will spend, knowing quite well that he is going to have to give a supplementary. That is what it sounds like to me. I take the point about the external exceptional circumstances in terms of the presence of a large number of Ukrainian people fleeing a war, which they and everybody else hope will be a temporary thing, and that the war will end and many of them will want to go home, and so on. On the Covid issue, I do not quite understand how that is still hanging over for 2023. Pretty much every health worker will say that we are massively understaffed and under-resourced, that we are stretched to the limit and if we do not get a Supplementary Estimate, the whole thing is going to grind to a halt. If what we are actually being told is that a Supplementary Estimate of a big magnitude is required, we are kind of just fooling ourselves in order to keep downward pressure on spending in the health service, and that is coming at the expense of an honest recognition of what is actually required by the health service in order to make it function as a quality service, with all the staffing and resources that it needs.