Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

The provision of private hospitals on public lands and primary care centres are not incompatible. A primary care centre is designed to stop people ending up in hospital and we all would appreciate the value of having more primary care centres.

In response to Deputy Sherlock, the figures I gave relate to those that are under leasing consideration at present. The HSE is using a range of different approaches, including direct capital expenditure on building, refurbishing or extending the units around the country. Separate to that, there are leasing arrangements under consideration. In those figures, 200 are under consideration for leasing arrangements. In fact, 95 are in contract negotiations at present. It is expected that 30 of those involving such leasing would open this year, which would be over and above anything that might be done through direct capital expenditure by the HSE.

As I indicated earlier, it is not intended to do anything else on the property-based tax schemes. Deputy Bruton stated that the amendment is only asking that the Minister for Health and Children would negotiate as well, but one would not want to delay any action that might take place by stating that we will wait to hear the view of the Minister for Health and Children, who might recommend incentives, etc., because it would be important to get these centres up and running. Having 200 of them under active consideration for leasing, over and above what has already been provided for, is not a bad record. For the same reasons I outlined at the beginning, I will not accept this amendment.

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