Mr. Tony O'Brien:

I made a more broader point in that regard. While there is much debate about this year's service plan and this year's projected deficit position, it forms part of a picture that goes on for a longer period of time. As the Accounting Officer and as we approach the issue of developing a proposed service plan for next year, which will be in the policy space and I will not talk in any detail about that, it is important that we look to see what specific lessons can be drawn from each of the previous years in which the service plan has not worked in the way we would have wished. I emphasised at the time that I considered the absence of enterprise-wide contemporary financial planning and accounting systems, which the HSE does not have as it is largely operating on the basis of the legacy systems it inherited, is a significant issue. The Secretary General has made reference to a couple of reviews which have been commissioned by the Department. They are currently being considered by the Minister and he has said that he intends to publish them in the very near future. They, too, will speak to this issue and one or two others. It is clear that the service planning round will need to draw on these lessons and take a very hard look at what we might do differently in terms of service planning in the future, based on this experience.

The point I was making about the PCRS impact, or the schemes which we broadly refer to as PCRS, is that even if everything else had been absolutely perfect regarding the assumptions, income collection and so forth, the HSE would still have had to find a way to deal with the fact that the level of requirement or eligibility for various schemes, in and of itself, would have knocked the overall financial position off by approximately €210 million.