Mr. Damian Ginley:

It is hard to put a finite figure on it. With our colleagues in the INMO and other Congress unions, we have asked the HSE to provide clarity with regard to the status of the funded posts that have been suppressed as of December 2023. We can walk into any hospital or community centre and there are vacancies left, right and centre. By way of an example, I said earlier that within the support grades of the workforce of almost 10,200 whole-time equivalents, we have only seen 19 additional posts being secured in the last 18 months. Nineteen posts could be within one portering department in a big hospital in the Dublin region or in the south of the country. There are gaps everywhere, and we have had to go down the route of freedom of information requests to try to get some of this information to allow us to engage then with the HSE on how it addresses this.