Mr. Raymond Byrne:

The commission previously completed a report on professional home care. That work has been done by the commission and we set out our recommendations for regulating professional home care. I absolutely appreciate that this was incorporated into the Sláintecare report and the commission is very grateful that this was taken up by the Sláintecare committee as well. We have completed work in that area and it would be a bit pointless for us to go back on that.

We were asked to examine the matter of the regulatory framework, and as Ms Justice Laffoy has stated, it is a priority project for this commission. This is one of the projects on which we have spent considerable time, right from the beginning of this fifth programme once it was approved by the Government. We pushed very hard to ensure we got out a good paper and we are again pushing very hard to ensure this project is completed in the shortest possible time, bearing in mind the very wide breadth of matters covered. We regard today as an incredibly important part of that process of ensuring we get the right answers for that regulatory framework.