Mr. Ger Deering:

That is part of it. As regards the wasted lives project and people moving out of nursing homes, I want to stress that only 10% of them needed actual own-door accommodation. Some of them had their own accommodation that needed to be modified. There are varying levels of scale of need. I was surprised by how few of the 101 needed actual accommodation. Some wanted to go back to their families, some wanted to go back to their own accommodation. Some went to more appropriate communal settings. It might be a house with four people. It would not necessarily be a local authority house, but it would be run by a disability organisation and it might have two, three or four people. I visited those houses. I met the people. What one person wanted to do was go to bingo. She is now able to go to bingo, which she could not do when she was in a nursing home. They want to go on holidays or downtown for a newspaper.

To be clear, I am not criticising the HSE. The HSE has been trying to find money from its own resources to fund this and make it happen but there is no set budget. When the HSE applied for its budget last year, it was not allocated sufficient funding to continue this scheme.