Mr. Bernard Gloster:

It is slightly more nuanced than that but the Deputy is not far off. People always talk about losing people, attrition or turnover. In net terms, the workforce in the health service has grown more in the past three and a half years than could be traced back to the foundation of the HSE in 2005. That is the first thing. Second, we planned - or at least intended to - recruit roughly 6,100 net new people last year and we finished the year at about 8,300. There are still people who came on in January who were contracted in the winter last year so I imagine, not to give my colleagues a shock, that we could round it as 8,500. That is 2,400 more than we targeted to do. That is a good thing but it is also a bad thing because there comes a point at which that is just not affordable and sustainable. Even within that, critical clinical grades were derogated, and rightly so. In fairness, the Department has never said to me not to do something that would hurt somebody. Again, we are walking a very fine line. All of that recruitment, every grade code in the HSE, is up very significant percentages from 2019 to now. We are talking 25% to 35% growth.