Mr. Barry O'Brien:

If decisions were to be taken to cease the payment of an allowance for new or all existing beneficiaries it would be applied in the same way on a pro rata basis to that grade. If somebody decided that nurses, for example, should not attract the specific allowance there could be equal application both in the statutory and voluntary sectors, and we have the numbers that work in each of those. For the information of the committee, there are 22,549 nurses working in the statutory sector and there are 8,681 working in the voluntary sector.