Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As I am taking this on behalf of the senior Minister in the Department of Health, I will give the Senator my understanding from reading the script here. My understanding is that the €1,000 bonus payment was paid firstly to the HSE staff. It was then paid secondly to the section 38 staff. They are currently working their way through the section 39 organisations. There are 850 of those section 39 organisations, of which 689 have compiled a report back in. There are 66,000 staff right across it and they are currently working their way through it. That is how it reads to me. The process is going far too slow for the staff who are section 39 workers. It is my understanding, based on the first page, that anyone who worked in a Covid centre qualifies for the payment if they were there for longer than a month. If they had to flick in and out, or if they were day service staff who had to step up to provide relief cover, they qualify as long as they did that over a period of a month across the entire pandemic. I think it is unfortunate that the likes of St. Christopher's and other organisations actually have to demonstrate how the person calculated their days if they were not solely assigned to that residential facility.