Mr. Tony O'Brien:

Deputy Kelleher asked whether the discretion still lay with the HSE or whether it had been removed. It very much lies with the HSE. The 1970 Act vested it in the chief executive officers of the health boards and the office I hold is the successor office, so the discretion passes through my office, as it were, and down through the system we have described.

Senator Colm Burke spoke to me during one the voting breaks about the duration of the emergency issue of a card in the event of terminal illness. Clearly, it is not possible to issue an indefinite card because there are hopes a terminal illness may not be terminal. We have to have a review period but to the extent we have discretion - I am not sure what discretion we have - we will seek to exercise it in terms of looking at that six-month deadline, recognising there will, nonetheless, have to be some deadline. However, we will look at it.

In regard to the issue raised by Deputy McLellan on the number of full-time mental health respite beds, we do not have that information with us but we will come back to her with it.

In regard to the protection of life review committee established on foot of legislation, the HSE has a statutory obligation to do that. We are going through the process of doing it but it is not yet complete. A number of steps have to be taken and we are not yet in a position to say the committee has been established. It is one of those things on which we are working as quickly as possible because it is, in effect, necessary in order for the Minister to be in a position to commence the legislation, although I think we would all agree not technically speaking, but practically speaking.

The implementation team, which will be headed up by Mr. Ian Carter, will report to me and, through me, to the Minister on a very frequent basis. We had correspondence on that just this week. It will also service the monitoring requirements of HIQA, which are derived both from its standard monitoring process and from some specifics in its report. There will be a very close time-based monitoring process. I only delegated responsibility for this to Mr. Ian Carter this week, having had a chance to fully review the recommendations from HIQA, which were only published one week ago. He will set out to me his intended timetable around the phasing of the various actions and how they relate to each other, the sequencing and so on. We will be very public about that. It is just that it is very early days in regard to the HIQA report, in particular.

I mention briefly the tax relief issue for medical insurance. In terms of the risk assessment we will have to do on the potential impact of that on the HSE's Vote in 2014, the HSE depends for some of its appropriations-in-aid on the income it derives from the occupation of designated beds by privately insured patients in public hospitals. There is also a provision for that to increase next year through a process effectively of de-designations, that is, that it would be derived from patients who are privately insured, irrespective of bed. If there were to be a significant impact on the number of insured patients, that would have a knock-on impact on the funding of the health service for next year. While not wishing to comment, in any way, on the specifics of Government policy in regard to that, it adds a further dimension to the risk assessment we need to go through in terms of the €666 million and the €1 billion challenge I mentioned earlier.