Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

As I said, things have changed and the pandemic period has made it harder to reach a guess, but one of our concerns in our paper was that an allocation was being made on a top-down basis that did not correspond to any bottom-up reality of how many people were going to be employed or how many operations were planned to be done. There have been some improvements in some areas since we wrote the paper to which I refer. For example, the HSE used to put out its strategy, but the figures on the number of staff relating to that strategy would only appear at the end of the year. They needed to be part of the original strategy. There were a lot of budgeting problems which, from our perspective, meant we did not have confidence in the projections for health spending.

To be fair, since the pandemic the health budget has been more predictable than it was in the past, which is surprising in light of what happened.

I think it is because extra money went into the system and some regular normal operations did not take place. There were a number of offsetting occurrences. We still have big questions about the budgeting arrangements.