Mr. Martin Varley:

I will make an initial comment in response and will hand over to Mr. Maurice Neligan. He works in a private hospital as a private practice consultant. The first point about value is extremely relevant in a number of respects. I would link back to the Deputy's comment about ensuring we can recruit and retain an adequate number of hospital consultants in our public hospitals. It is a long-standing issue which the current Government has looked at. One fifth of our permanent posts are vacant and have been for some time. This Government commissioned a Public Service Pay Commission report on the matter, which recommended in September 2018 that parity should be restored to ensure we can recruit and retain staff. In fact, some of our figures suggest that we could do that on a cost-neutral basis. However, if we have savings arising now, a small part of those savings will go a long way to rectifying the recruitment and retention problem among our younger hospital consultants, who are very much front and centre in dealing with the crisis.

Going on to the Deputy's main point, value for money in the contract is obviously in question. We would regard it as being poor value for money with the passage time. Of course, when the deal was being agreed and struck initially, we would all agree based on what we were seeing playing out in Italy and Spain, that we absolutely had to bring on board any capacity we had in the country. Our members practising in private hospitals were fully committed to that. As a working group, we invested a great many hours with the officials to that effect. With the passage of time, we can now see that we did not need the capacity. We must also allow for the fact that the population who depend on private practice consultants for care, often in their outpatient clinic and often requiring follow-on care in hospitals, would have returned to those hospitals in greater numbers than we have seen. We have lost the opportunity to use the capacity at a vital time and we have paid dearly for that. I would now like to hand over to Mr. Neligan.