Mr. Damien McCallion:

We have discussed this in previous committees in respect of the historical decision to outsource at the time and whether the capacity was in the country. That has been debated and that decision was made many years ago. In terms of value, what we are trying to look at now, as a result of the new opportunity with HPV, is how we balance that private-public mix. We need to be careful in that it is not unique to a country as such. In other words, we have some of the capacity here in Dublin in a private company, some in a public laboratory, some in a private laboratory and some in a UK laboratory. The key thing is that they meet the standards and the assurance.

We referred earlier to some opportunities with the new contracting arrangements. The Deputy will appreciate I cannot go into that today as we are trying to finalise those contracts to balance between the private and public system in future. The laboratories we use are all big international laboratories or part of an international group. One of our objectives is to try to balance the private-public mix with the current contracts as well as in respect of HPV testing. We also discussed that earlier. There will be an opportunity with the HPV test as well to look at how we balance that.