Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On that issue, there was an arrangement whereby 50% of the infrastructure costs on the islands related to health and were provided by the Department with responsibility for the islands. They got pulled out and were not caught in this cost-benefit analysis of doing it in a housing estate for 1,000 people versus aligning it with 100, 200 or 300 people. The experience of that was that it accelerated them and the HSE got very enthusiastic about doing the work. In one case there was incorporation of an apartment for locums - whether a doctor locum or a nurse locum, it does not make any difference - such that there would always be an apartment available for somebody who had to stay on the island. Do the witnesses think that if we were to revert to that, it would incentivise the HSE to prioritise this? What is needed on an island is very modest because the population is not huge, but it would accelerate their ambition to do these things and to do them now and would take them out of the queue that is there on the cost-benefit analysis.