Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I want to follow on directly from that. I was talking to representatives of the INMO. To cut a long story short, they stated the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform had sanitised and gutted the HSE's submission. It was then put together as a joint submission to the Public Service Pay Commission. The HSE's submission to the Minister which is not the submission made to the pay commission stated retention was a big problem and that pay was a factor. Essentially, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform gutted that submission because the Minister did not want to acknowledge the problem politically.

This is related to the criticism about not accurately estimating expenditure to be incurred. The Minister is not facing the reality which then just comes back and bites him. In this case, it is going to come back and bite him in the form of a nurses' strike. The dogs on the street know that pay is at the base of the failure to recruit nurses. For every four nursing posts advertised, there is only one application. There are nearly 2,000 fewer nurses in the public health service today than in 2008. We are not able to recruit them. Meanwhile, the number of health managers is burgeoning. The costs arise because the Minister is failing to address the underlying problem. I would like a direct answer to the question as to whether the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform gutted or sanitised the HSE's submission that acknowledged there was a major retention problem and that the problem was related to pay.