Professor Peter Conlon:

Deputy Catherine Byrne commented that there was no pot of gold to fund the health care system. As each kidney donor will save about €700,000, one could consider a kidney donor to be a pot of gold. When one multiplies this figure, the economics of transplantation are enormous. I said up to €300 million could be saved over ten years by treating kidney failure predominantly by way of transplantation rather than by dialysis.

Senator Colm Burke spoke about whether we could cope with the level of transplantation. As we said, we cannot. We have 100 pairs of donors and recipients waiting to donate a kidney to each other. Therefore, it will take us three years to do it. With this in mind, we have put together a business plan to very rapidly try to expand capacity.