Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

If I could make a point coming back to Deputy McDonald about the cost of the fair deal scheme. There is a note, note 12, in the HSE's financial statements, which refers to the cost of long-term residential care and gives an analysis of it. The figure for nursing home support scheme - fair deal private nursing homes only - is €623 million in 2016. The cost of public nursing homes is €333 million. That is a bigger figure than fair deal. Not everyone who is in a nursing home is on the fair deal scheme. That gives a figure of about €950 million, so roughly €1 billion is nursing home support, a subset of which is fair deal.

We are also doing some work around fair deal, particularly looking at costs, costing models and so on. The timeframe for completing that will be longer than the committee is focused on. We will continue with the work we are doing. If matters are dealt with and there is nothing further for us to pursue, I probably will not report on those aspects but if there are other residual aspects that I feel there would be useful to present to the committee in a special report, I will do that in due course.