Dr. Donal de Buitléir:

Yes, that in ten years' time there will be none of this. The most important thing is that new consultant appointments should be made under the Sláintecare contract. That would mean restoring pay and having new contracts for new consultants. It is critical that this be done early. The longer we continue to issue the existing contract we are pushing up costs because we would have to buy them out. If consultants are given contracts and we then want them to change to something else, they will have to be bought out. It is a normal rule of life that if one is in a hole, one stops digging and making the problem bigger. With the legislation and getting the newer consultants onto the Sláintecare contract, the third piece would be getting into negotiations on the contract change payment. We did not put a number on it because it would be a matter for negotiation or judgment. The negotiations would try to get a reasonable number of the 3,000 consultants working under the existing arrangements onto the new ones. They are the three things I would do early.