Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

-----and their staff, unlike those of the section 38 agencies which tend to be but are not always the larger agencies, are not considered to be public servants. As the director general has said, we do not receive funding for staff increments, albeit it is an additional cost we have to pay out every year in respect of our own staff and the section 38 staff. That does not mean we do not seek that funding. Every year we certainly do, but we do not get that funding.

There is significant work - a paper has been submitted - ongoing in the social care division under the umbrella of implementing the value for money report which is seeking to bring greater transparency and comparability between the resource going into the disability side, particularly intellectual disabilities, and the quality and volume of services that is being delivered. Despite the challenges of the implementation, as the director general said, of very necessary recommendations from various HIQA inspections, we are still progressing that. That process of service improvement is in some cases enabling us to mitigate those costs of having to resource what is coming out of those HIQA inspections, even though we are not resourced for what is coming out of them.