Mr. Shane Hamilton:

I can only speak for our services and the challenges with ensuring the standards are in place for staff regarding training, education, social care and clinical governance and the fact we have always celebrated these increases in standards and made sure our services met them. Across the board, our colleagues in front-line services are struggling. They have to give year-on-year contracts and no permanent contracts. They cannot give a competitive rate of pay. We are trying to also ensure they also have the highest standards of education and training.

It would be remiss of me to think our services and sector will be able to do this based on continuous goodwill and passion when it is becoming a professionalised sector and it will be hard to keep some individuals working in the sector if there are better and more attractive terms and conditions and rates of pay in other areas in the social care sector. It is something we will have to look at but we are lucky with the passionate staff we have across all our services in Tallaght. The work people are doing is to the highest standard but we need to ensure that continues. No different to how populations and insurance costs have grown and the quality assurances we have to give have increased, so must the standards and terms and conditions for the staff working in these organisations.