Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

It is a combination. I am not trying to be obtuse, but the first thing to do was to look at what level of service could be provided, what level of service had to be provided and what funding was available. That determined, in part, the requirement to identify €346 million of savings. We set out in the service plan three tranches of that. Areas were identified for the first €77 million, typically some drug savings, some agency and overtime savings and other savings of that order.

We were clear that there were other, as yet unidentified areas, which made up the second and third tranches. Those had not been identified when the service plan was done. Have we made as much progress as we would have liked on value improvement savings in 2018? No. Programmes like that take a number of years to get fully off the ground. We are short on that and we accept that. There are significant issues to be overcome in focusing on that level of savings. There were a number of unexpected draws on management focus, including the storm and an extended winter surge. These are perhaps excuses but were we overly ambitious? Maybe that is how it will be viewed but the alternative to being overly ambitious was to be unable to provide the level of service that we must provide and which was necessary. We need to be ambitious at times but we do accept that we are falling short on that figure of €346 million.