Ms Linda Kelly:

Our understanding from members we met at some of the protests last week is that a direction has been issued for them to be cleared off the system.

I am not in payroll so I cannot give the detail of it, but somebody has to go in and manually turn those off. A HR manager in an area cannot then go and recruit for that post because the number associated with it is gone.

To come back to the Deputy's earlier point, Fórsa members working in clerical administration were the canary in the coalmine in relation to this dispute. They were the first ones targeted for a recruitment embargo in May of last year. It was extended out to other groups as we went through 2023. As we engaged with the HSE, it told us repeatedly that it was conducting a validation exercise on vacancies right throughout the end of 2023 and into early 2024. When the pay and numbers did not materialise in February 2024, the HSE said it was not finished its validation exercise and it still had to go through it. I find it astounding, then, that for months the HSE was telling us it was conducting this big validation exercise on vacancies and yet the data is not available to everybody.