Mr. Ciar?n Ruane:

I am saying an extension would probably have to be raised by 1 ft. or so, but the tie-in was the issue. We do not know what exactly that flood assessment will come out with but it is probably in the order of 1 ft. It just makes it difficult to tie-in. It can be done. It is easier to do in a non-clinical environment.

Coming back to the issue of the costings that has been brought up on a number of occasions, we never really got to a stage of saying that this is what we need to do to the building because every time we looked at it, there were so many things required. I stated that we had 13 patients on the middle floor and what one had to do to bring that down to a safe standard. I refer to the fire regulations, etc., and what we would have to do in terms of fire escapes. For instance, we would have to replace the two wrought-iron fire escapes. We should really put in a fully-enclosed fire escape on each side. We have the central area. The central stairs is not a good situation in terms of compartmentation. On our new buildings, we would aim to have compartmentation so that if a fire happens in a certain area, one can move all the beds - one can move the patient and the bed - down into the next compartment. We cannot do anything like that in Carrick-on-Suir.

This is where we in estates department would be saying our solution to buildings like this is a new building. That is what we are doing in Clonmel. With St. Anthony's, on its own, there was no point in even trying to tie into it. That is why we put that onto a new site. We did the same in Waterford, with St. Patrick's. Once again, one could tinker around with trying to tie into that but the reality is, for the best and most cost-efficient way to provide the long-term correct standards, one needs a new build. We would say the same. That was our advice going back a number of years. The solution to Carrick-on-Suir was to build a new building on a greenfield site. That was our recommendation when we looked at it. As a result, we never came up with the costings because we never really came up with a drawing that we could cost.