Mr. Colm Desmond:

I am clearer on the correspondence now. When the service plan was published at the end of last year, with significant additional funding for the range of areas I mentioned, it did indent a series of savings that needed to be achieved to balance that service plan against the provision from the Government. That is set out in the service plan, as published.

The budgetary oversight group was set up at roughly the very beginning of the year and the purpose of that group, in a collaboration between ourselves and colleagues in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and the HSE, is to work through how we would actually achieve what the service plan sets out to do in delivering significant additional funding across a range of areas but also recognising that the level of funding available is, regrettably, never enough for the scale of demand facing the sector. The process I was writing to Ms O'Connor about was simply deepening to the level of how we might engage within that process and maybe get greater clarity on how those savings might be achieved. If there is documentation that can be made available, we can look into that, but the process of work of the oversight group is continuing.