Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

The HSE is conducting a review of the system, as planned and put together over the past seven or eight years, to see whether it is capable within a reasonable cost of providing a modern management system for the health service's 140,000 staff and its annual payroll of €7 billion. The details of just 40,000 staff have been placed on the system to date. It has been estimated that a further €55 million will be required to complete the project. That the HSE is trying to use a manual system and a computerised system at the same time has caused a large part of the problem. The huge variations between the systems in place in the 11 health boards which were brought together to form the HSE has led to this problem. It has not yet proved possible to solve that in an easy way. The system was evaluated. It is incorrect for the Deputy to say it was not evaluated properly in the first place. The ICT system in question——

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