Dr. Patrick Owens:

Concerns have been expressed through standard channels since 2013. That is when the risk register was originally utilised, and it is there to flag risk. That is since 2013, and it has been consistently identified as a critical risk up until the start of last year. At the end of 2014, I wrote both to local management and to the Minister at the time, and again at the end of 2015, identifying this as being a real and present clinical risk which endangered people's lives. In that document I identified that people on the waiting list had had heart attacks already because of the delay in getting patients off the waiting list and into the catheterisation laboratory. It was in that context that, ultimately, the business case was submitted by the HSE management in South/South West nationally for funding and when the formation of Government came around, it was queued for funding, to use the phraseology, centrally. That is where the negotiations started and, subsequently, the Herity report.