Mr. Robert Watt:

There are plans with regard to three elective hospitals in counties Cork, Dublin and Galway that will have the capacity to do between 900,000 and 1 million procedures in a given year, which will take enormous pressure of the existing acute system and provide much better care.

The Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath, and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform have put in place new procedures now for capital projects with reviews of different gates and different stages in the approval processes as they are going through. The new elective hospitals will be part of that and so on. Obviously, the big issue is about the actual procurement model and the two-stage approach that was used for the children's hospital. I do not think that will be used for the electives. It will be different. In many ways, the elective hospitals are not as complex. They have a significant footprint, particularly the one proposed for Dublin, but I do not believe they are as complex as the children's hospital. There is a new approach to try to avoid the unsatisfactory situation that developed with the children's hospital and the costs associated with that.