Mr. Kevin O'Malley:

Yes. It is a tripartite grouping of UCD, the Mater hospital and St. Vincent's hospital that has been in place since 2007. It is an incorporated institution. As regards Navan, to me, it is all about the clinical links. There have been significant clinical links and referral pathways over the years between Navan and the Mater hospital. Being a bit presumptuous or greedy, I would have said we were a little surprised we did not get Cavan included in our group as well because of our joint appointments between the Mater hospital and Cavan. We were not surprised by the inclusion of Navan.

I will say a few more things about academia and the chief academic officer, CAO, a point raised by Deputy O'Connell. I do not think any of our groups feel that the academic part of it is anything other than highly important. In our submission, we stressed our ambitions to set up an academic health centre. We cannot do that without an ambitious third level institution behind us. Our CAO has been integral to everything we have done so far and is embedded in the management of our group on a daily and weekly basis. Unfortunately, we are going to lose him as he is about to become president of the University of Limerick. For us, the appointment of his successor will be critical to how the university and the hospital group go forward. Trying to get the governance between the hospital group and the university right is very difficult, but to us it is critical.

I will make one last remark about medical recruitment, which is a recurring theme. Nationally, the squeeze is on model 3 hospitals. I am happy to say that within our group, competition for the model 4 consultant appointments has been relatively robust - maybe not quite as good as it has been in the past but relatively robust. If we can get the linkages between the model 3 hospitals and the model 4 hospitals properly organised, and we have already appointed about half a dozen different people with joint appointments between the Mater hospital or St. Vincent's hospital and a peripheral hospital, it will make the consultant appointments in the model 3 hospitals far more attractive. There is a consultant appointment committee in our group. Every new and replacement appointment goes through that committee and is looked at from a group point of view as to whether the sessions should be reconstructed a little, so a Mater job might give up a quarter of its time to Mullingar and so on.