Mr. Bernard Gloster:

There are two or three things that affect the capacity of the State in responding. Deputy Colm Burke, to be fair, has raised the issue with me previously at the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health. The modern day regulatory standards for the provision of continuing care for people rightly require very significant capital infrastructure improvements and replacements. In some cases, that has caused a loss of beds. It has caused a much better improvement in the quality of care, but it has caused a loss of beds. We have a continuous programme of building new capacity-----