Professor Harry Kennedy:

My colleagues in the senior management team for the National Forensic Mental Health Service have spent, more or less, half our working week for the past four or five years directly involved in planning. Why are the numbers not stacking up? A story against ourselves, in a sense, is that going back more than ten years ago, we surveyed the population in need of hospital treatment in the Irish Prison Service and the criminal justice system. We did gold standard epidemiological surveys of need and we published extensively in research literature. A full report was lodged in the Oireachtas Library. It indicated a need for approximately 350 beds. The planners in the Department at one stage saw the 350 figure as an argument for 170 beds. I said to Senator Devine earlier that industrial relations are not the same as professional issues. People do not get the difference between research and expert evidence and bargaining. It is not bargaining; it is objective evidence.