Mr. Phelim Quinn:

If I may, I will deal with the Chairman's last point first. I spoke earlier about some of the information we had received over a period, some of which was received from parents. That was what prompted us to initiate a proactive assessment of the governance arrangements within Portlaoise hospital. I am not saying that was the only indicator, but it was one of the indicators, and it certainly would potentially have led us to some of the conclusions we made in the investigation report. However, that would have been under section 8 of the Act, because it would not have been a statutory investigation in terms of monitoring against the national standards.

With respect to proactiveness, I would say - this is not an excuse - that HIQA has been existence for eight years. It came into existence in 2007, and since then it has conducted seven statutory investigations. The vast majority of HIQA's activities within the health care system in Ireland have been focused on investigation work. Therefore, most of the resources of HIQA have had to be pulled into what is a reactive form of regulation within our health care system. I came to HIQA two years ago as director of regulation, and one of the things we have tried to do is to initiate a more proactive programme of monitoring against standards, because we believe that not only will that elicit information from our health care system, but it has a better chance of driving improvement, as opposed to a situation in which we are continuously reacting to crises within our services.