Mr. Tony O'Brien:

Many years ago I had the privilege to chair the board of the National Cancer Registry Ireland which is a separate State agency. It does not operate within the HSE but is under the aegis of the Department of Health. It does its work transparently, reports well and has done good service. In this instance, there is a data protection issue which has been overcome. The general data protection regulation, GDPR, which will come into force very soon will provide a particular route to overcome data protection issues. The fault is not the National Cancer Registry Ireland's. The issue is that information was given that the audit that had been carried out had involved the totality when it had not. That is the basis on which the Minister was briefed and on which he briefed the House and the Government. He was briefed incorrectly in the way I described when I was here last week. Because it is a very serious matter if a Minister is misled, I made it absolutely clear, on behalf of the HSE, that any onward misleading was not the Minister's fault.

I have had occasion to discuss with the committee and others my views on the creation of the HSE and its structures. I opposed the way in which it was created and worked very hard to keep the part of the organisation that I led out of it, but time caught up with me and it became part of the HSE. The creation of the HSE, despite the many good things that go on within it - members have referred to some of them - was an exercise in how not to do change management. From policy to implementation in 18 months, many of the underpinning factors described in the reports that proposed the creation of the HSE were never acted on and have still not been acted on. I refer to having integrated financial systems and so on. The Minister used the phrase, "too big to fail and too big to succeed". That is right. The notion that one person - me in this case, or my successor; I hope there will be strong competition for the post and I will certainly encourage people to apply for it, although at this points I have doubts about the competition - must be personally accountable for every failure and mistake of the 140,000 individuals who work in the health service is not a basis for accountability. There are strong recommendations made in the Sláintecare report that I have publicly supported in that regard. As I have indicated before, I was appointed to an organisation that was to be wound down in the aftermath of the abolition of its board. Three years in - I had a year before the five-year start - as it was clear that that would not happen, I started on a different course. However, at some point - the fact that there is now all-party consensus proves this - we must have a settled position on the structures of the organisation, but in six years what have we done? We have abolished a board and are now going to recreate one. That is not great progress.