Mr. Ian Carter:

For the past three weeks, there has been direct engagement from at least three hospitals with Mount Carmel, in particular looking at midwives, theatre nurses, etc. That dialogue was still ongoing recently and has been fairly proactive in terms of securing potential people to transfer to St. James's, St. Vincent's and Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda. There is still live debate with those individual nurses. Can I give the Deputy an exact number of people who have definitely been offered contracts at this stage? The answer is "No" but as I said, there has been quite strong engagement for the past three weeks.