Professor Jim Egan:

The jewel in the crown is the nurses and the infrastructure to support the family with organ donation. We have made progress since the European directive in 2012 but we are some way behind the UK, which had a human tissue Bill in 2004, 15 years ago. Other jurisdictions have been working on this for a long time and the Spaniards started in 1989. We have got stuck into it in the past few years but we have a way to go. We need at least €2.1 million, in new money, to target organ donation and transplantation. That would be distributed to the specialist nurses and the retrieval teams and would underpin the education of the relevant stakeholders. I do not count the money for the register in this figure, nor that for the public awareness campaign. I am talking about infrastructure money to support those extraordinary families and the extraordinary work that goes on in intensive care units on a 24-7 basis, 365 days a year including bank holidays, August, New Year's Eve and Christmas night, whenever the work goes on. We need an infrastructure that covers 32 hospitals across the country.