Mr. Tony O'Brien:

The rationale came from different places, as I explained with Mr. Jim Breslin the last time we were here. In 2012 the then Minister initiated a process called the Higgins review which considered a set of criteria for hospital groups but which did not take into account community health services. I will come back to Deputy Billy Kelleher's specific questions about the creation of the hospital groups. As a result of their creation, the ISAs no longer functioned.

The HSE sought to deal with the implications for community services, where it had a particular concern and that is where the report on the community healthcare organisations, CHO, which is population and geographically-based, comes from. That then leads to the discordance between the two.

In regard to Deputy Kelleher's specific questions on hospital groups-----