Mr. Éamonn Donnelly:

First, I could not state with any real confidence there is a stand-out part of the public service which excels at projected workforce planning. We cannot separate multi-annual workforce planning from multi-annual budgeting. If one was a systems person and thought there would be a reconfiguration of the health service and that the HSE would be very much streamlined downwards through a move to integrated care organisations that would have autonomy, and if one was workforce planning on an multi-annual basis, one would need workforce planning for that event. We are currently in a big state of flux. If everything was to stay the same, which we know it will not because it cannot, one might get away with the cap in hand approach year on year. However, if we were serious about, for example, relieving the pressure on acute hospital healthcare and were to allow acute hospitals to deliver acute healthcare and to have proper interventions in the community, we would need to have a multi-annual approach both from a budgetary point of view and a workforce planning point of view.