Mr. Colm Desmond:

It is the nature of the process that there is a certain lag in the reporting. Reporting cannot be simultaneous because of the scale of what is required in terms of compiling information from a diverse system such as the hospital system. However, the Department and the HSE were aware and signalled relatively early in the year that there were pressures emerging. From that point of view, I imagine the issue was more that a specific figure may not have been available at that point.