Dr. Alan Barrett:

We are thinking about this and having a discussion at the Good Friday Agreement committee. Over the next 20 years, regardless of Northern Ireland, we have to plan for population growth of approximately 1 million in the South. All of these discussions have to be layered over that. During a quick discussion I recently had with a colleague, they made the point that the big constraint in Irish healthcare at the moment in the Republic is not physical infrastructure but the workforce. To an extent, we think in terms of systems. Professor McGuinness touched on the point that if we do not have the bodies to populate the system, we have a real problem. The merging of two systems with two workforces, two civil services or whatever it is, and where people are on very different pay rates and in very different structures, is enormously complicated. We have not even touched on merging the welfare systems, for example.