Professor Risteárd Ó Laoide:

To respond to the Deputy's question, for breast services, there are a number of stages in the acute stage in a service that is stretched, has experienced the Covid pandemic and the health service cyberattack and that has tremendous staff who are probably tired at this stage, but we need to keep going. We have got pandemic funding, the safety net 2 agreement and the National Treatment Purchase Fund. We are using every resource possible to increase the access to diagnostics and diagnosis for patients. We are working in a concentrated effort on that with each of the cancer centres. We are also working in the medium term on the family history issue and the surveillance issue, and we have worked on the referral issue. We have new referral guidelines in situthis year, which, hopefully, will reduce the number of referrals from GPs to our symptomatic units, giving them more capacity. We are working on those three projects in the short to medium term and we need to complete those. If we stream those groups of patients we can have a much more efficient symptomatic breast service. The most important element people have mentioned is the diagnostic imaging capacity because of our radiology workforce. That is a much more difficult nut to crack. Throwing money at it will not help it. We need to develop a plan. Training is happening but we need to make it an attractive profession. We are looking at that in the context of the larger picture in the HSE generally for all services. I believe it is an international problem.