Mr. Bernard Gloster:

The Deputy is quite right. I know that when Fermoy became a point in question earlier in the summer, there was a lot of engagement and effort to try to improve that situation and stabilise it. Most of the co-operatives around the country are owned by GPs themselves, but we do fund them and it is in our interest to have them - believe me. For every time we do not have a doctor available out of hours, we have somebody attending an emergency department who does not necessarily need to be there, so there is no question for us of the value. General practitioners themselves will generally say they are happy to run the co-operatives and out-of-hour centres if they are able to hire enough doctors to cover the shifts, because they simply cannot cover them themselves off the back of their working day in surgery, so the pressures are somewhere in the middle. I know the chief medical officer in the Deputy's area is working hard on that with the national primary care service.

There are also many good things about SouthDoc in the area. I want to be clear about that and do not want to be pejorative. Nevertheless, given what I have heard recently about SouthDoc, it is my intention to meet the doctors myself, with the leadership in Cork, to see if there is anything we can do to stabilise the type of concern the Deputy is talking about. In the mid-west, particularly in rural areas such as west Clare or County Limerick, there are the same challenges, with reductions in the number of cells. The co-operatives are not able to maintain the numbers of bases or cells they previously were able to.