Dr. David Hickey:

I again thank the committee for giving us this opportunity. Everything has been more or less covered. All of the questions have been adequately covered.

I was very interested to hear about Deputy Catherine Byrne's personal experience. I think she would agree that if she had not been offered the opportunity, it would have been a source of sadness for her family. It is a service to the donating community.

The single unit will be located on a university hospital campus such as the one in Oslo in order that we would have our great anaesthetic colleagues beside us all the way. In respect of cost, it is a question of what is the priority. There is a hospital just down the road from here called the Mater hospital, with a plaque on it dated 1846, when construction of the hospital began. That was in the middle of the Famine and there was a set of priorities. It is still a leading hospital.

Professor Conlon has said it is cost-effective to do it, but how a society looks after this group of people who suffer a slow death over a period of years makes a statement about it. Money should be made available for this centre. It should be an attractive career for people who will want to spend their lives in it. The way to do this is to have a single centre that will be state-of-the-art and in which where there will be no triplication of services and in which all units will be brought together to develop a centre that will be worthy of this country and the community we serve.

To reply to Senator John Crown's question, we are being distracted from looking after people by meetings with ambivalent paraprofessionals in the hospital setting. This centre needs to be governed, managed and funded by an organisation such as the national organ donor and transplantation office and answerable to this committee, the Government and, ultimately, the people. The patient has been pushed down the priority list in health care. It is all about budgets, targets and business speak. We need to get back to doing what we would want to be done to us if we were sick.