Mr. Tony O'Brien:

Deputy Durkan is absolutely correct on social media. The HSE has increased its social media presence quite significantly in terms of monitoring and communications. At the risk of sounding pithy, I make the point that all the people who do that work are clerical and administrative staff too. There is a bit of theme coming through.

In relation to emergency management in the health sphere, the HSE carries the statutory responsibility for emergency management. In the last period we have developed the national emergency operations centre, which is the centralised control system for all of our emergency resource deployment. We have also significantly increased our emergency planning capacity. It is now formally part of the brief of one of our national directors. We also have a head of emergency management and we carry out frequent risk assessments and drills. Fortunately our national risk assessment on terrorist related emergency health care related incidents remains low, but we have observed very closely what has happened in our nearest neighbour in terms of recent events and have engaged directly with our counterparts in terms of lessons learned and so on. Clearly in the health space, mass casualty events are more likely to come from transport related incidents and so on. We carry out live exercises in that space and are working on conjoined planning on a cross-public sector basis with the Defence Forces, the Fire Brigade services and An Garda Síochána who would be in the lead in the context of a security related incident. I am pleased to say this is an area where we are well prepared, notwithstanding all the other challenges that the health service has in responding to emergencies, which is what we do. We have gone through a very elaborate process of ensuring that we are well prepared.

The recent cyber security threat to our health service, to which the Minister referred, is a textbook example in that we followed our major incident approach.

The issue of morale has also been raised. I am glad it was, because it is not necessary to denigrate the quality of what our 100,000 plus staff do in order to make the case that we need to improve the health service. Others do that.

On the issue of cyber security, in the National Health Service, NHS, in the United Kingdom they were susceptible to more risk and more targeting. I think they lost 40 hospitals for a whole weekend. The BBC celebrated with a special programme on the work of the cyber security team in the NHS. We in Ireland took some steps, protected the entire health service from attack and the headlines we got were actually critical in that same week that we had successfully rolled out a maternal and infant information system to create Ireland's first so-called digital babies, real babies, of course, with a digital identity. The contrast was, of course, not lost on me. We have a terrible habit of looking for the negative in our health service, when there is tremendous work done day-in and day-out by the staff who work in it. They showed resilience under the cyber security attack, which is not yet over is but was one example.

On the general point made in respect of the fair deal scheme affecting the Devereauxs, this is a people business, it is delivered by people and people sometimes make judgments that they regret perhaps afterwards or which they would change. There is a great phrase that covers it, that "to err is human". I would not jump up and down on an individual who made a decision in good faith. The important thing is that the decision in caught and corrected. Clearly "Liveline" is a national institution originally under Marian Finucane and now under Joe Duffy. What we need to do of course is to make sure that people understand that it is not the place they go to, to get issues resolved. Just as I once appointed and continue to have a confidential recipient in the area of residential disability services, we will be giving serious consideration to how we have our own "talk to Joe", response so that things can be resolved even more speedily and more effectively. Not that I want to steal the real Joe's thunder or anything, but I do not want people to have a feeling that in order to get common sense applied, where things have not worked out well initially that it is necessary to expose his or her life to national radio. That adds a further trauma. We will look to see how we can improve on that.