Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Cullinane. Many of them will come to work in the public system. We have covered nurses and doctors. The third big group are the health and social care professionals, as Deputy Cullinane has rightly pointed out. We are hiring health and social care professionals this year. We are hiring them with the new development funding. The individual regions will be given an awful lot of latitude in terms of redeployment. There are retirements and other things going on and the services will want to reallocate these posts. There can be redeployment.

Another point is that we do not train half enough health and social care professionals. Deputy Cullinane is aware that I am looking to double the number of healthcare college places. When we go through some of them in particular we see we have one graduating class of essential health and social care professionals in the country and many of them will still be hired this year. Some of them will be covered in the more than 2,000 staff we will hire this year. Some of them will be covered through replacement staff. There will be plenty of health and social care professionals retiring this year. Once we get back to the funded level, these replacement posts will be authorised.

I take Deputy Cullinane's point that we have had three very strong years in the context of recruitment. It is worth saying, when we look back pre-2020, that what we have this year is what in previous years would have been a normal healthy year of recruitment with 2,000 to 3,000 net additional healthcare professionals coming into the system. Over the past three years we got used to an exceptionally high level. As stated, I take Deputy Cullinane's point . I acknowledge that it probably does cause distress for some people who are graduating in September.