Mr. Conor O'Brien:

Starting with the inspectors, we have 164 people in inspector grades in the organisation. We have 85 of those doing either inspections or investigations and 79 of them are doing things like market surveillance work in the chemicals area in terms of control of major accident hazards, COMAH, inspections.

They are also grades we use for accreditation so our accreditation assessors are in that number as well.

We have 44 vacancies at the moment with 29 of them being inspector grade III vacancies. That will give the Deputy an idea of the situation. The vacancies are not as a result of people resigning or retiring. They are as a result of increased headcount that we received from that Department for which we are extremely grateful. We are working hard to fill those vacancies as quickly as we can. As I said in my opening statement, the issue is primarily down to salary. For instance, we do a significant campaign to recruit grade IIIs. We start with a large number of people but that quickly whittles down to a small number of people because, in fairness to people in the private sector, they are used to negotiating their salary, etc., and we have fixed salaries, as have all public sector bodies. The feedback we get when people drop out of the process is that it is down to the salary or, in the meantime, they have picked up a job at a higher salary in another organisation or in a private sector organisation.

We have a normal rate of staff turnover. Another thing to note about our positions is that we seek very specific technical expertise in some cases, and particularly in the chemical area, which is not that easy to find.