Jack Chambers

And there's corrective action to slow the amount of agency staff being recruited within the health system overall.

So the new CEO of the HSE with the Minister of Health have taken positive and corrective action to try and moderate the increase in health expenditure.

And actually, health expenditure was...

overall was actually falling from January to March.

There's usually a spike in expenditure in January following the Christmas period and for obvious reasons.

Well, look, we've increased

health recruitment by about 30,000 in the last five years.

The budget has grown exponentially.

Absolutely.

And but but there are there are again, no area of the public service is immune from driving greater efficiencies and being more productive and

with the level of expenditure that has increased in the last five years.

And we need to speak about that as much for people who expect us to deliver better public services.

It's not all about how much more we allocate.

It's a very simplistic conversation which dominates

the Irish political discussion excessively, where it's a debate on who gets how much more.

It's actually about reforming how systems function, how they can better deliver for people who expect better services.

Part of that is obviously improving headcount or improving the

allocation in any given budget, but it's also about how we deliver better services for people.

And that's why the corrective action being taken within the HSE, within the Department of Health, is about, you know, it's administrative grades, it's in management grades, for example, so they slow the overall increase in their budget.

Well, you see, the expenditure levy is for 2027.