Mr. Paul Reid:

At a national level, there is no doubt that a significant proportion of the population - over 50% - choose to have private healthcare. People choosing private healthcare is very much a part of the health system in Ireland.

Government policy, which we are executing, is to reduce the use of private capacity within the public health system. I touched on some of that earlier with Deputies. We want to do that and see that executed. I do not know the exact percentage, but it is low. We use the NTPF more and more significantly as part of the access to care fund for some of the more basic procedures. Mr. Woods can talk about that. We also use the private system now. We use approximately 1,700 or 1,800 bed days per week, which is approximately 400 patients per week from the public system. We are leveraging off private capacity to do that. Overall, the vast majority of care happens within the public system, but we have our constraints and we would like to see more capacity.