A recruitment freeze at the Health Service Executive is to end tomorrow, according to CEO Bernard Gloster.
The recruitment freeze was introduced by the HSE in October last year.
It was extended in November to include all categories of staff, with the exception of consultants, doctors in training and 2023 graduate nurses and midwives.
Next year, the HSE will be given an extra €1.2bn to meet the cost of existing levels of service.
Speaking on RTÉ's This Week, Mr Gloster said the additional €1.5bn is permanent money that goes into "the base of the health service."
He said that before this week he was concerned about 4,000 "essentially unfunded" posts, but thankfully those posts are now "funded and secured".
Mr Gloster also said that despite the embargo, more staff were recruited than left the health service.
The HSE has entered into an agreement with Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly to work within the additional €1.5bn in funding it received, Mr Gloster said.
"Of course, that will bring us some pressure and challenges, but it requires us to established a control environment that is different to what we had before."
He added: "The simple point being that in responding to need, and in responding to service growth and development, we simply have to spend what we have and get the best use of that rather than spending what we don't have."
Mr Gloster said agency use would only be reduced by €80m this year, not the previously discussed €250m.
"Dependency on agency in 2019 was €423m that has practically doubled to €787m in 2023. We have gone up again slightly on that."
He said that now limits have been set, they will be "retracting back to last summer's level of agency essentially."
Around 900 equivalent agency full-time posts will be converted to HSE posts this year, said Mr Gloster.
Meanwhile, he added, recruitment limits and controls for regions have been set and cannot be breached.
These mechanisms were implemented in order to avoid previous issues and prevent services from drifting over the limits.
"The limit is now given to a region which includes the hospital and the community which gives a greater chance of responding to the needs of the population and prioritising appropriately," Mr Gloster said.
"For example, after tomorrow, there will only be about ten people in the country authorised to actually put someone onto the payroll system."
Mr Gloster said the ceiling for recruitment is 125,400 whole-time equivalents, excluding 20,000 in disability, which was set at 31 December 2023.
"And by the end of this year, the affordable ceiling will be 129,700, so it is quite significant. There is about 2,300 new development posts in there also within that money," he said.
