Official budget measures of €666m at the Department of Health might not be enough to balance the books, according to senior sources in the department.

The HSE could implement a new incident management system as soon as next month in an attempt to speed up investigations into unexpected tragedies like the Savita Halappanavar case.

Practical politics are multi-layered

It may be a tad cynical to suggest that because the first meeting of our long-awaited constitutional convention was scheduled to begin its work just days before a much-feared budget that it might not get the attention such a radical, in Irish terms at least, innovation deserves.