Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent)
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I thank the Chair and welcome the witnesses. Carla was here and Paul is here now. There has been a lot of talk I have listened to, and I was listening on the monitor before I came to the committee room, about resources, under-resourcing and this type of thing. The witnesses talked about the section 38 organisations and section 39 organisations. I have a reply from the Minister for Finance from last week where he says because the employees of section 39 organisations are privately employed, he has no control over their terms and conditions. If the witnesses were to bring all of their staff tomorrow morning to the same level as the HSE, would the organisations survive on the present budgets? Would the services survive? That is the first thing. We can talk about new directions and it is progressing, but progressing slowly. Somebody was talking about going up a hill and coming to the top of the hill. At the moment, a lot of the services could be stuck where they are at in the sense that they cannot progress.

The population is getting older, services are more demanding, and when I hear that if an individual service has to be done and somebody is sent out to a house or community, it is somebody who may have been able to cater for three or four people in one setting. I can well understand the challenges that are there, but we are at nothing if we do not get the fundamentals right. I know there is not enough staff in Ability West to provide the service. What Ability West is doing is incredible but I do not know how long it can keep going or how long the staff can keep it going because they are doing great work. However, at some stage we have to call a spade a spade.

Is pay for staff the single biggest issue? If that were resolved, would everything else follow from that? Would we have a better service? If we had pay parity between section 38 organisations and section 39 organisations, would that solve problems? Is that a big hurdle to get over? We have a budget coming. We need to know these things. I will make that point and see.