Dr. Fergal Lynch:

I accept the point. The rising cost of providing health care is a feature of the Irish health service on which the Minister and others have commented with great concern for a considerable time. We are working intensively to address that. In particular the focus is on insurers to audit the volume of procedures for which they pay, to audit the appropriateness of those procedures and to examine the prices paid in fees to health professionals, private hospitals and so on. We are pursuing these issues very actively. I will not pretend that there is an immediate simple answer that we can give tomorrow morning.