Thank you Mr. Chairman. This is a big and important topic, so I am going to ask the deputy minister, who is also public administrator for a couple of authorities, to elaborate.
But before I do that, I just want to say that you will see from the debt figures that the debt amount, the trend has stabilized somewhat over the last couple of years and also the Member does have a point in saying he believes some of the authorities are underfunded. That might be true, but as a system we need to be able to justify how so, not look at the whole thing but we need to be able to break it down to see where is it funded or not funded in a correct way and then what can we do as a system, what changes we need to make to change the way we are doing things. Because I would think that not only as a Legislature here, but as a Cabinet Minister, if you are getting a presentation from the Department of Health and Social Services about where we really think the deficit lies or the reason for it, we need to be able to establish and come up with that blue chip information, which is what we have been working on.
So I am going to ask Paddy to highlight some of the findings that she has had and she is working on, because I think in a year and a half I believe that we are coming to a time where we will have a lot more clear picture than we ever had before. Thank you.