Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Recruitment agencies. I simply did not get an answer. I got other answers but not the answer about how much it cost. What I was told, which is fairly extraordinary, is that of the 70,000 people who applied for the Be On Call for Ireland programme, 111 have been recruited.

That is pitiful. It is against a background of a dire need for increased staffing for Covid and non-Covid care, where we were already in a chronic situation in terms of capacity with poor levels of staffing before Covid, and we have additional needs. These agencies have managed to recruit 111 people. Some 663 people are job-ready and available for employment when they are required, which suggests we are deliberately not employing people even though they are qualified to do the job . We are just sort of keeping them on hold, which is extraordinary. Insofar as there was an explanation as to why we had gone through these agencies, it was because it would threaten the stability of the existing HSE payroll structure, which is just nonsense.

Will the Minister shed any light on this pitiful failure by these agencies, the refusal to recruit people through Be On Call for Ireland, and that bogus explanation as to why we use these agencies in the first place?

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