Ms Eilísh Hardiman:

I do not think I can give the Deputy a straight answer like that. What I will say is that we have carefully taken into account how it has worked within the existing hospitals. We have a mixed model and that has stood to us because the HIQA reports on the three children's hospitals have demonstrated in particular areas that direct employment has worked really well while in other areas outsourcing has benefitted. We will take the experience of the children's hospitals going forward. However, we have a mixed model at the moment across the hospitals. I, more than likely, see that continuing because of the benefits demonstrated. I am talking specifically about cleaning here.

In other areas there are structures that we will go through and that we know are well-established industrial relations processes. Of course, we will recognise those mechanisms in any of the proposals that we put forward.

On the question on land, to be clear, the heads talk about the transfer of assets. The only land owned by the three children's hospitals is in Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin. The others are not owned and, therefore, will not be transferring. The proposal is that Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin will be transferred to the Children's Hospital Group. We have started formal discussions on that with the HSE to see potential future use but I assure the committee that we will be using it for the next five years so we do not need to have it all concluded. It is important to note that the objective of that board is for the benefits to be for children's health. I want to be clear that it is not that we are running services on these hospitals because we need all the services to be consolidated but that is one of the conditions we would like to see honoured in those discussions.

There is very clear guidance in the health system around car parking. It is not core business to us. We do not have it in Temple Street, so it is only in Tallaght and Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin. It is managed by a car parking company. One of the things we are working through is the funding of that. I might ask the chief financial officer to talk about that.

I have dealt with the issue of the lands. To be very clear, the children's hospitals have a good record on fundraising and have very well-established foundations that successfully fundraise for both the existing hospitals and our very important research agenda and patient comforts programme. We have had a very positive meeting with the three foundations only two weeks ago who came to say that like us, they will merge into one foundation, which is a very positive development. We welcome that. We are working closely with them in establishing the future philanthropy and fundraising activity for the new children's hospital.

I totally support what Senator Colm Burke said regarding the transition period that is required for the amount of change we need to do. As we are opening up the new facilities, the first of which is the Phoenix Children's Hospital in St. James's Hospital in 2019, there is an element of rotating staff within those services because not all services are there so it is predominantly our emergency department, general paediatrics and trauma orthopaedics. That is a key element of success whereby the people who are delivering services know each other when they go into the facilities and understand their processes. Part of the reason it is so important to start the integration programme so early is so we standardise as many of those processes as possible so that people are not doing things differently when they come together in the facilities.

I concur with the point made about sustainable management. In large projects, the moving on of senior staff is seen as a big risk. We are on an infectious albeit challenging programme. It is really important that we attract the best people to deliver on this. We have experienced some challenges about some posts. That is the reality. We are working as much as possible with the Department and others to come up with sustainable solutions to ensure we get good management in place. We have made some progress relating to that to identify the specific skillset that is required to deliver a programme of this nature. My colleague has answered the question relating to pay, conditions and the autonomy of the board.