Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The context for this is important. The Deputy quite rightly referred to the increase in healthcare demand. We have had an unprecedented increase in the number of healthcare workers as well. There has been a pretty extraordinary 24% increase in our health and social care workforce in the lifetime of this Government, or nearly 29,000 more healthcare professionals working in the health services than there were at the start of this Government. It is nearly 10,000 more nurses and midwives, more than 4,000 health and social care professionals and more than 3,000 doctors and dentists. The context for this, therefore, is that there has been a massive increase in the number of staff throughout the country.

Nobody would want to put an embargo in place, but the HSE was hiring so many people and it was not responding to a more graduated approach such that, ultimately, thousands of healthcare workers for whom there was no funding from the Government were being hired by the HSE. Unfortunately, therefore, a coarser measure, the embargo, was required. We do not want it to be in place and I am working with the Government to resolve it as soon as I can.

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