Ms Lucy Nugent:

I understand why Deputy McAuliffe is asking me this question because there was a suggestion in one of the media articles that this was a driving factor. When that came to my attention, through hospital inpatient enquiry, HIPE, data, we were able to analyse the fact that in one of our institutions, 25% of those patients were private and in the other institution, 26% of patients were private. Under the old contract, consultants are allowed to do between 20% to 30% of their activity as private work, depending on the type of contract they were on. Based on those data, there is no suggestion this was done for financial gain. There was a philosophy-----