Mr. Damien McCallion:

It is a challenge to get consultants who might want to work in this area. We have to examine merging specialties and we are looking at that with our medical manpower people to see how we could design that. The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, RCPI, has been working very closely with us on all of this also. There is a major commitment by everyone to try to improve that. We need to be conscious that we need those partners to work with us over the next number of years and beyond. In most countries the model used tries to have more than one laboratory to ensure there is some resilience in the service in the event of another crisis of any sort arising. To illustrate the point, people may remember the tragic death of a lady in the UK, Jade Goody, which caused a major spike in people coming forward for screening and the programme there ran into all sort of problems at the time, although nowhere near the circumstances we are in today. We need to have capacity to be able to increase the programme as required and to have the resources available.