Ms Rosarii Mannion:

At the moment, we are funded for 5,825 staff. As of today, we have 5,600 staff at work. We still have room within our ceiling to recruit, which we need to and are doing. The challenge is always about having the right staff in the right place at the right time.

In terms of the structural reform, we have developed a very sophisticated resource allocation model that enables us to identify where our resources are and where we need them to be in terms of supply, geographic distribution, societal issues, environmental issues, etc. We know now where we may have excess, where we are understaffed and so on. We are doing that work and we will engage with our staff as part of the reform programme to see where we may need to refocus our energy and efforts. Overall, with the very dedicated focus we have on staff recruitment, staff retention, workforce planning and trying our best to create a culture of health within Tusla, we will, slowly, meet the staffing challenges we have. Unfortunately, this is not happening as quickly as we would like.

On special care, as the CEO said, we are very grateful for the new grade. Staff can now earn up to €67,000 within special care. We are pleased to get that. It will assist us but it will be a medium- to long-term strategy. Likewise, our apprenticeships absolutely are the way to go. We should not find ourselves in this situation in three, four or five years. That is the timeline. We would love it to be much faster. We have a very good overseas recruitment campaign whereby we are bringing in staff. In anything we do, particularly with reference to our people strategy, we do not want to bring forward a solution that adds to the stress on our system and our excellent staff. We want to support them. It would be very unwise to bring 250 overseas staff into teams, areas or units because we would just create additional problems. We are very much on top of the issue, ahead of it and getting all the support in place. However, the message I have is that it will be a medium- to long-term strategy.