Ms Jean O'Mahony:

I might take Senator Ryan's questions in two pieces. On the point about demand, I am not saying definitively that Government policy can only respond to demand, but rather that it would be prudent to understand the demand that exists in order to consider what the policy response should be in order to understand that the State is meeting it, but also that if the State was to fund it, it would be taken up. It was not necessarily a causal piece.