Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

The Department has 62 local offices. We have about ten of what we call our headquarters buildings - buildings through which centralised schemes are provided, such as pensions in Sligo, child benefit in Letterkenny or the illness schemes in Longford, plus headquarter buildings. We have a headcount of nearly 7,000 staff. The overtime bill is spread across all of our activities; it is not confined to one area of activity.

The Deputy will appreciate that the Department, in keeping with all other Government Departments, has had to operate within an employment control framework in which there has been a moratorium on recruitment. As our activity might peak or demand might peak, we might feel that we would like to have additional staff, but within the entire public service network, we have to play our part in terms of reducing public service numbers as well.

There are particular reasons for the use of overtime. In some instances it can be because of seasonal activity. For example, the back to school clothing and footwear allowance is covered by a very seasonal scheme. We bring in a number of temporary staff to help us for the three or four months concerned, but equally overtime is involved as well to ensure that there is no disruption to the Department's other business during that period. I do not have the precise information to hand but I know, as I would have inquired about this, that high overtime payments tend to arise in situations involving our IT support, where we may be confined in terms of the number of people involved and we require them to engage in on-call activity and all the rest of it in a specific timeframe because there is crucial piece of work to be done. It can also arise in respect of our security people. In different offices the opening times might require us to have people in work for longer than the normal working day in order to provide front-desk activity or security. They would tend to be the people who are in receipt of the greater amount of overtime. In most other cases it tends to be very seasonal or specific. To round off that point, for the year in question, as I mentioned earlier, we put a specific focus on trying to address the backlogs in activity in our illness schemes in Longford with assistance from folks in Letterkenny. Therefore, there would have been high overtime costs over a number of months while we were dealing with those.