Ms Paula Keon:

The Deputy is correct about the GP out of hours service. It is a very important part and I will get to it in a minute. In fact, there have been 30 years of intensive cross-Border work between North and South. For those of us who live on the Border, it is very much the norm to get a service in the other jurisdiction. Since 1992 there has been a formal arrangement, the Ballyconnell agreement, whereby services North and South set up the cross-Border organisation, Co-operation and Working Together, CAWT. That was done largely using European INTERREG funding to seed projects North and South to use economies of scale and find solutions that we could not otherwise find because of our geographic distance from the urban centres. To Brexit-proof our current range of work, which is an INTERREG 5A €30 million project, we have it underpinned by Her Majesty's Treasury. With the Department of Health, we went to the UK to seek assurance that the current round of funding will be secured until the end of the programme of funding in 2020. The future of European funding is obviously uncertain and probably part of the future arrangements. We will have to see what happens there. The current round of funding that seeds these projects is underpinned.

Outside the INTERREG funding there is a lot of North-South work going on. The radiotherapy centre is very innovative and the only capital build in health on the island of Ireland with a ratio of two thirds to one third built and the same in respect of patients. A second one is the primary percutaneous coronary intervention, PCI, which is clinically absolutely the solution for the patients of Donegal. They only have a 90 minute window for their stents. It is absolutely the solution for our patients. We did a mapping exercise to look at all these service-level agreements and memorandums of understanding, including the ambulance service and GP out of hours service, which was the solution for 243 patients in 2018, as was noted earlier. We have all of those mapped and they are underpinned by the common travel area. As Mr. Breslin said, it is not anticipated that there would be any break in service on day one.