Jack Chambers

And in fairness, the Minister for Health and the CEO of the HSE are taking corrective action to moderate the increase in health expenditure this year.

We've exempted certain areas, but most departments are subject to it.

So we've protected frontline health, justice and education because, you know, that's important frontline service for people.

It's important to protect that area.

We've also protected pensions and social protection spend and obviously housing and homeless services.

There's a variation across the levy from...

I have.

I published that last week in a parliamentary question.

No, I've actually last week in a parliamentary question, I set out a table of what the percentage levy was across every government department.

So I think it's about point.

It's less than...

0.01% for, or about that, approximately around that for Department of Social Protection, up to about 1.4% for other government departments who aren't, I suppose, being, who aren't subject to health or justice.

Well, if you take private sector organisations, they regularly would drive efficiencies much more than 1%.

And I think people listening to this programme this morning would expect the Irish state to have more efficiencies and reforms in how we manage.

day-to-day expenditure.

So I think this is the right thing to do.

It helps us build greater fiscal discipline and manage expenditure into the medium term.

And that's why, as I've said, across other administrations which may not have growing economies and don't have the same fiscal space as Ireland, they do this as a mechanism to actually, you know, create opportunities to deliver new measures where you drive efficiencies to actually do new measures.

This is a, I think, a useful exercise to build discipline, but also ensure that there's collective responsibility when we reprioritise expenditure.

So what they've done to respond to that is they've restricted recruitment in certain health regions in administration and management grades in, I think, three of the health regions.