It is now nine months since the pandemic bonus for front-line workers was announced. HSE workers were paid quite quickly after that but there are other workers across the State and in every community in Ireland, who would have worked extremely hard during that period and exposed themselves to Covid, whether they were in the fire service, cleaners in our hospitals and healthcare providers, nursing home staff or in the Defence Forces. Many of these people are getting very frustrated. They feel they have made just as much of a contribution as many others. It has now been nine months. The HSE has said that there are various complications, and so on, but this should have been anticipated from the start when this was announced. Nine months on, when are these front-line workers, who worked so hard and served us all, going to get their bonus payments?

Those workers are in touch with us as well. I know many of them are very frustrated at the delay in these payments being issued. It should be acknowledged that almost 124,000 staff have received the €1,000 pandemic recognition payment. In essence, those are the people directly employed by the HSE, which includes many section 38 voluntary hospital staff, but many others are waiting. The Deputy identified a number of different categories. This issue has been discussed in recent days at a political level. It is a priority that we get these payments issued quickly. The Department of Health has brought in additional help to support it in working through some of the complexity that is there. It should not have taken this long but we are determined to get this completed as soon as possible because all these workers deserve these payments quickly.