Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The point is there are thousands more posts now than there were. What can be done? Hospital managers and regional executive officers can redeploy. Ultimately, there are thousands more posts today than there were this time last year. We are talking about an overrun of €1.7 billion. We have to get away from a world where individual hospitals, and it is mainly the hospitals rather than communities, feel that they can just hire any number of staff they want, regardless of how many they are funded for. We simply cannot do that.