Mr. Bernard Gloster:

There are two or three points there. I would not stand over any service area withdrawing a home care package because somebody would not go to a nursing home, and David Walsh is here with me. To be fair to the service area I have not heard from them but it may be the case that what they are giving is not enough to keep the person at home. Can they give more? I do not know but I am happy to take the case from the Deputy.

The Deputy is right on the issue of planning. I met the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, and the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, just last week. The issue we have faced for the last number of years is that we get an allocation for emergency placements. That is when the family unit either breaks down or the parents are elderly and become ill or they die. It becomes an emergency placement and we buy a placement either from a section 39 organisation or a private provider. Increasingly now an individual placement runs to several hundred thousand euro. I had a very long discussion with them both on the capital side and on the future potential revenue side of how we move from emergency to planned placements for those people. I met a group of parents from Cork of adults with very severe to profound autism and the only question those parents asked me - and rightly so - is what happens when they die. Despite all of the good work and all of the placements we do fund, and I want to recognise that, we have a long way to go to plan because the demographic tide is against us.