Mr. Tony O'Brien:

Consider the Phoenix Care Centre in Grangegorman. The Chairman is probably familiar with it. It is a new mental health facility. That environment is producing better outcomes for patients in shorter stays compared with a number of old facilities. We have a great deal of health care infrastructure that dates back to the days of the workhouses and needs to be upgraded significantly. Were we to do so, we would have much better outcomes for the equivalent service spend.

The primary point is that, given the age of our X-ray and MRI equipment, ventilators, ambulance fleet and so on, we do not currently see where the money will come from to replace all of that when necessary. This is because so much of the capital envelope is devoted to large projects.