Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I would love to be in a position where the HSE could simply go out and hire whatever staff it believed was appropriate and we could simply write a blank cheque, which is what we would have to do. I know the Deputy is not suggesting we do that. We cannot do that. We cannot run any public service in that manner. I am aware that there are pressures but it is also incumbent upon me and others to challenge the HSE to a certain extent. As some in the HSE, who have seen this over many years, have put it to me, there is a culture of additionality in the HSE. In other words, there is a view that this or that can only be done with more staff as opposed to an acknowledgement that there is more staff than ever before. In fact, there are thousands more staff in the HSE that it was even funded to hire. How can it be that staff cannot be redeployed or the thousands of extra staff cannot be used to deal with some of these pressures? I appreciate the pressures. We are looking at the situation and at ways of dealing with it to protect front-line services. At the same time, we need to challenge service providers by saying they have more staff than they have ever had before and they need to deploy them as well as possible.

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