Dr. Amir Niazi:

Certainly, we will welcome a review of bed capacity. A review of acute services has already started. I believe there is a meeting today in this regard.

We have an opportunity now. We have Sharing of Vision and the programme for Government so we can plan for step-down services for the next ten years and see how it should be done. I welcome Mr. Farrelly's recommendation on taking a unified approach to deal with all this.

In previous years, even when the Government allocated funding for mental health services, there were times when we were unable to use them. Much of our funding is for manpower. Even if services had funding, they might not have been usable because consultants or nursing staff were not available. As Mr. Ryan says, there should now be a unified approach. We are working with the HSE's national doctors training and planning division and the training college to determine how many consultants we need to train for the next ten years? Similarly, our nursing colleges are considering what numbers will be required over the next ten years, how many beds we will need, how many units that are single occupancy units that-----