Mr. Jim Breslin:

There is a question of the legislation and what is allowed for. Through the Office of the Attorney General, we have got a significant amount of legal advice which is being finalised and which will, I think, be released to us within a few days. At that point, we will look to secure the best option to secure as much money as we can.

As Mr. Mulvany said, there are two issues. There is the day from which something is chargeable. A quite separate issue is that all of us have an entitlement to go to a public hospital, whether one has health insurance or not. If one has health insurance in one's back pocket, one is entitled to go to a public hospital and be treated as a public patient. That is a person's primary entitlement as a resident of the State. The means by which one becomes a private patient is when one waives that public entitlement and decides one does not wish to be a public patient and ones wishes to be a private patient.