Colm Burke (Cork North-Central, Fine Gael)

I will move onto the next issue of nursing homes. People are referring, and rightly so, to the RTÉ programme and the abuse that was clearly identified, but there are also two other challenges in nursing homes. One is in the gap between what public nursing homes are getting per bed per patient, which is around €1,969 per bed per week, whereas private nursing homes get something like €1,200 per bed per week. That is a gap of €750, so there are huge pressures on private nursing homes to deliver the same quality of service. How would the witnesses address that?

My other issue around private nursing homes is that we now have over 10,000 private nursing home beds that are controlled by a very small group of companies. Do we need to introduce legislation to ensure that is not allowed to happen into the future? If one of those companies decided to cease operations in the morning, how would we then deal with the vacuum created?