Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Independent)

I presume the Deputy saw the letter from the Taoiseach to her party leader. It refers to projects that are signed or to be signed. The Deputy may recognise that there is a serious financial and banking crisis affecting large projects in Ireland and elsewhere. We are affected by that. Private investors carry the risk for all this work. They must carry the banking risk and get the funding. I am optimistic that will happen. From the time that construction begins to commissioning will be somewhere in the region of 28 to 36 months.

The Deputy has an ideological problem with this but I invite Deputies to talk to people at St. James's Hospital or any of the public hospitals involved to hear their enthusiasm for this to proceed. I can quote from a letter from St. James's for example which states that this will allow the freeing up of a significant capacity, equivalent to 21% of its annual hospital admissions. It will allow the doctors to see all their patients within six hours in the accident and emergency department and all elective admissions to happen within three months, and so on and so forth.

There is no other money available to this country to provide additional capacity in our acute hospital system. The idea is to move private activity from the public hospital so that the public hospital, funded by the taxpayer, can deal with public patients. It is intended to keep consultants on site instead of having them work in multiple sites around the city, as the letter from St. James's states. The merits of this are enormous. The banking arrangements will be put in place. I hope to see some of these projects proceed very quickly.

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