Roisin Shortall

I suppose it was a case of things coming to a head and it was inevitable that there was going to be a bit of a showdown at some stage because for many decades in this country, there's been a kind of lack of clarity about the role of consultants and the kind of mix that they could engage in between public work and private work.

And I mean, there was a row around 2008 with Mary Harney as minister and there was a new contract introduced and still that contract wasn't fully implemented.

So it's always been a grey area and there's always been question marks over who actually supervises consultants.

And finally, then, as part of the Sláinte Care proposals, the new contract, the public only consultant contract was introduced in 2023.

It was signed off by the representative organisations and the government.

Stephen Dunley did a huge amount of work and deserves credit for that.

And it was introduced, approved in 23 and then came into force in January this year.

And it's a very generous contract.

And I think that's very important because the work that obviously public consultants and all consultants do is really important.

But this was requiring a commitment from consultants that they would only engage in public work in public hospitals.

And that's what they signed up to.

And they did that voluntarily.

Now, it was very popular, as it turned out.

The representative organisations weren't in favour of it for a long time, but consultants themselves were, and particularly consultants who had gone abroad and wanted to come home and didn't really want to be part of that whole public-private mix thing.

And they signed up to it.

So now 70% of consultants are on that contract.

Well, I mean, that's the argument that there's under putting forward, that that's their legal interpretation.

But it certainly wasn't the intention of the contract.

And as I say, that was all signed up to public only work in public hospitals.

There was a concession made that some of those consultants could do private work in other hospitals, in private hospitals.