Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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The Chairman will be glad to know I have only one more question anyway. I am aware the Chairman is anxious. I am also anxious, I can assure him, to get parity with everybody in this business.

The point I want to make is this. There is a proportionality issue as well. If we employ 10,000 new staff over a period of time, there must be a proportional number of those proposed for the coalface as well as the administration level. What the proportions are varies from one discipline to another but it is important to recognise that there is no use employing 10,000 administrators and no medical staff.

On the slowness of the appointments, I both accept and do not accept it. On this one, I am for and against. I honestly believe that it is simple to figure out, first, whether the person applying for a temporary post is qualified for the post. Second, while the rest of the appointment process is laboriously being entered into, they can be at work notwithstanding the fact that they may or may not be still a candidate for the position.

They may have changed their mind and gone elsewhere. The longer a person is kept waiting, the more expensive the system becomes. We need to address that as a matter of urgency. To conclude, there is no sense in having 100,000 administrators if their numbers are out of proportion to those at the coalface. It is not going to work. It cannot work. We can have all the people in the world telling us what should be done and when, but there must be operatives with the required expertise at the coalface, putting their fingers on the various sensitive areas to identify how the flow can be best assisted. I am not sure that we have done that. We have not done that for a long time. We need those people to move the queue along. The critics will say that I am another politician trying to jump the queue. I do not want to jump the queue at all. I want the queue to move along, for God's sake. How long must we wait before we all realise that?