Ciarán

You're not becoming a speech and language therapist with the HSE to be a millionaire.

It's a sense of vocation.

And then to have a parent...

And I'm not blaming the parent for a moment in this, and I don't want to sound like I am, but, you know, to have a parent that's standing in front of you telling you how you're failing their child, it must be really dispiriting for you and your colleagues when that happens, is it?

Lovely to take the time to write to a child.

Well, I hope Santi came through with the DVD and David Attenborough came through then with the accompanying letter and signature.

That's absolutely lovely.

Listen, unfortunately, I'd love to listen to these stories all day.

We have to take a break.

Well, now management, I think, again, they would say they never deny those problems and they just say, listen, we're working hard to solve them.

So I was looking at the numbers as well, Brenda, after you got in touch when you were listening to Anne O'Connor.

The Irish Independent, actually, they were pretty startling.

It was last year they had a couple of articles on this.

So overall admin staff numbers over 10 years rose by 50%.

And grade 5 to 8 middle managers went up 134%.

Yeah.

So sometimes, I think sometimes as well, I've heard, you know, some of these middle managers or senior managers say, and it's often off the record, they say, because they don't want to stick the boot into politicians, their paymasters, but they say, you know, they're kind of forced into some of this expansion that you've got sláinte care reforms, that you've got all this kind of compliance and legal reporting obligations, that you've got the introduction of more digital health systems.

And this is stuff that's

that's from the outside imposed on the system, as it were, particularly, say, compliance and reporting obligations, and they just have to hire middle managers to manage all of that.

They have to meet those obligations.