Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

I do not want to take away from our issues but by far the largest part of the change in the problem is not on the hospital side or with consultants. It is with the insurers. If the Deputy had asked this question three years ago, slightly more than 50% of the total debtor days and the associated money was in our administrative process, which we have effectively halved, or with insurers, which went down a bit but has gone up in the past year. The bigger part has gone from being approximately 50% to 65% and involves waiting for insurers to pay or to make their queries. Querying is, to some extent, absolutely reasonable but the level of querying by insurers has increased and our engagement with insurers to get an agreement on better payment terms has led to an element of delay in some payments. Our issues are our issues but we are experiencing significant difficulty with insurers who are delaying payments.