Sir, – Given the perennial supplementary budgets which keep our public health service on the road, I thought it was disappointing that the news that the Department of Health will not need a bailout this year was relegated to page 2 ("Department of Health will not need a bailout for first time in many years", News, September 29th). This startling revelation surely merited greater prominence and in-depth analysis to see whether the lessons could be applied elsewhere.
So how was it achieved? The answer is simplicity itself. In Budget 2021, the Department of Health was allocated an additional €4 billion, about half of which was for Covid-related measures. So the additional non-Covid funding was about €2 billion and it is expected that health will underspend its budget this year.
The moral is that embarrassing supplementary budgets late in the year can be avoided by the simple expedient of voting huge additional financial allocations at the beginning of the year. Why didn’t we think of that before? – Yours, etc,
PAT O’BRIEN,
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Rathmines,
Dublin 6.