Colm Burke (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am just saying there are legal technicalities in this issue. The letter was quite clear. It had to be signed off by the end of March. There was no reference at any stage in the letter that this was subject to the final agreement of the Minister.

I wish to move on to this other issue of a joint approach by the Department. By the way, I agree we need to have a far greater and better relationship between the university sector, private sector and public sector. The best example I can give of this is a project in Canada at the moment where there is a new children's hospital being built, with two thirds of the funding coming from the state but the remainder coming from people contributing, whether it is people contributing $5 per month or pharmaceutical companies contributing major money. The whole project is $3.8 billion. They must raise $1.2 billion themselves and so far they have raised more than $900 million.

Does Mr. Watt believe we should now be looking at this in the context of the way we do health and health research in particular? Does there need to be more co-ordination and more of a joint approach between our third level sector, our hospitals and the private sector in view of the fact we have huge numbers of pharmaceutical companies based here? In Cork alone I think we have nine of the top ten pharmaceutical companies. However, we seem to have drawn a clear line on connectivity with our medical services.