Mr. Bernard Gloster:

That goes back to one of the earlier questions. We have spent most of our investment bringing what we now call community nursing units up to standard rather than losing or closing them. As we have spent most of our investment on that, adding to the public capacity has been a challenge for the past few years. The challenge for the next few years in capital investment for older persons' residential is to accept that we have now come up to a standard and we need to add to capacity. I think I can say with confidence that there is no plan to close any and there is a definite plan to increase many - the reason being our disproportionate balance on the private sector. The dependency is too high in terms of nursing home care and we have to correct that. We also know from evidence that public nursing home care will allow us to respond very well to things like the impact of stroke, dementia specialist units within them and adding on a day centre in a place like Killybegs, which is the lifeblood of the community. I can assure the Senator that none of them are going away. We have brought most of them up to a standard with which HIQA is happy but we must now increase public bed capacity.