Mr. Gerard Guinan:

Yes. As an organisation, PDFORRA has invested €150,000 in the scheme. The executive took a really brave decision to invest member funds in this scheme to effectively help ourselves. Mr. Quigley has done Trojan work on it over the past year. Throughout the pandemic we have continued to send people up North to have operations. Mr. Quigley has steered this scheme through. It is beneficial to the Exchequer and it provides extreme value for money. We take the shortfall on it, but we get the operations subsidised in the North.

We return people to duty faster than they otherwise would return through the public system. The skill sets that those people have are retained in the service. Mr. Quigley really has changed the lives of people, for example, who are suffering from cancer or back injuries. I can recall people contacting the association to express their thanks. Some of them reported that they had been suffering with back pain for a number of years, had undergone surgery and were subsequently pain free. The value of that to the individual cannot be quantified. As an organisation, we want to expand that service for our own members to put them through the system faster and to extend it to family members and possibly veterans in the future.

There is an enormous amount of work that goes along with that. We can only provide value to the Exchequer in circumstances where we have a degree of support. That is badly needed.