Mr. Bernard Gloster:

A feasibility study commenced in the HSE on that issue. When I last addressed that issue in here, it was made clear that neither building nor providing housing was our core skill-set and I need to keep my focus on building hospital beds and services. That said, we have a feasibility piece on which I met one of our senior staff yesterday. I hope to have that study concluded shortly. Essentially, it is going to say that accommodation is part of the issue that contributes to recruitment and retention challenges. I do not think we could get to a scale of addressing that directly. I believe the best possible outcome for us on that issue is at the Land Development Agency, LDA, which is negotiating with us to take available healthcare lands for developing in accordance with its statutory brief. I expect that, as part of that and in return for that, for any accommodation or housing it builds it would factor in the local health community particularly on those lands. The Minister last month agreed in policy and in principle to look at the possibility of our assisting in some way with the accommodation challenge for three groups of people. They are the people we recruit from abroad, as the Secretary General said, and who find the first few months challenging - student nurses in their final, intern year and non-consultant hospital doctors on six-monthly rotation work who are particularly challenged. If we could assist those groups we would make a contribution towards retention. To be fair to the Government, I have not given a proposal on that yet for it to consider and work on. It is very complex because there are equity issues. Once you get into it, to whom do you give or not give it? I believe that apart from the LDA, if we were to go into that space, it would be such parties as approved housing bodies, AHBs, that I would rely on to try to help us. As I said, we would not make a very good landlord ourselves.