Mr. John Horan:

For doing the work the Government has allocated to us. The Deputy said it was a temporary measure. We did a lot of good work in the first decade but our mandate changed quite significantly in 2012 and we adjusted to the new circumstances to provide a strong measure of support to the health service, which was being reformed.

I smile to myself a little at the question on public money in public hospitals. An ideological criticism has been made of us that we are giving public money to the private sector, that is, private hospitals and private nursing homes, so we decided to test the system last year to see if we could get value for money within the public hospital system. There may be a blockage in some areas while there is capacity elsewhere and we try very hard to utilise that capacity.