Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Neither I, the Deputy nor those working in our ambulance service would stand over or defend those individual cases where people clearly have waited far too long. Nobody would defend that. On the response times, the core targets the service works to are the ECHO and the DELTA times. They were very close to those times last year.

I hear the Deputy's point about going back to the 2015 figures. This is why I wanted to give the Deputy just last year's figures. Of the 600 new staff, 228 of them were just last year. I understand the Deputy's point. This is also why I wanted to say that most of these 228 were hired towards the end of last year. We do want to improve those figures.

The question tabled by the Deputy was about retention, the numbers joining and the numbers coming in. I will answer that directly in my next response.

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