Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Regarding the vote that will happen in Westminster tonight, the sequence is that any initial response will come from the EU institutions in Brussels. We will co-ordinate with Brussels and I imagine any initial response will come from there, and perhaps from us thereafter, but more likely tomorrow than today.

In terms of the SCU staff, some have transferred to other Departments, some have taken up jobs in the private sector, some have been transferred to the Government Information Service, GIS - indeed, that is where many of them came from in the first place - and some have been reassigned within the Department. I do not have any experts on health economics in the Department, to my knowledge. There may be people who have degrees in health economics but I do not know that for sure. My focus is always on working with my Ministers and trusting the line Departments. I appreciate there are different approaches and I know that, in the past, Heads of Government have set up mini-departments within the Department to monitor what other Departments are doing. My general approach is to trust my Ministers and to trust those line Departments. My job as Taoiseach and the job of my staff is to co-ordinate and to lead but not to try to do the job of line Departments for them, because they have the expertise.

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