I also want to ask about staffing in the health service. In July, the Government announced a lifting of the recruitment embargo in the HSE. However, over the past few weeks I have started to receive desperate calls from staff in multiple departments in my local hospital about a recruitment embargo being imposed in St. Michael's Hospital that is endangering patient safety and means workers are demoralised. I looked into this a bit further because I wondered whether this was a local matter. I then discovered from the INMO, as well as from speaking to people in the National Rehabilitation Hospital and elsewhere, that there is a recruitment embargo under a new name, called a pay and numbers strategy, which has created arbitrary staff ceilings based on posts that were filled in December 2023. The consequence of that is that thousands of unfilled posts at that time have disappeared and been suppressed, leaving our health services understaffed and unsafe.

In the middle of the year, we provided additional funding to the HSE for not only this year, but in advance of budget 2025, to ensure it is better funded than it had been before and to respond to the funding difficulties that began to develop at the start of this year. The HSE can only recruit those it is funded to recruit. It is not an embargo. It is the way every other Government Department and public service works.

Even if they are understaffed and unsafe.

It does not matter how much money we make available to the HSE in the Deputy's world. It does not matter what we do. It is a fundamental part of how we have to spend the country's money that in order to recruit somebody to do a role, the money has to be there to pay for it. The budget that we make available to every part of our public services contains a recruitment budget that we need our public services to operate within. It will lead to more people being recruited for health services and more funding being made available for the work we know needs to be done.