Mr. Jim Breslin:

Yes, very much so. It was not just that this was modelled. This was what we were actually seeing within our hospital services. I mentioned in the opening statement the figures for ICU. Within the space of a week, the number of people in ICU had doubled to 111. The deal was done at 111. Over the next ten days, which was still within the incubation period for the virus, that number went up to 160. We were on a trajectory that was going to see ICU capacity run out. Two things happened. We took public health measures - the entire country took them - and assiduously implemented them to interrupt the virus. That managed to dampen the slope of the curve we were facing but we also had to put contingency in place and the most immediate and available contingency was in the private hospitals. There were 100 critical care beds in private hospitals and over the space of a weekend officials in both the Department and the HSE, with the full support of the Private Hospitals Association, put together an agreement that allowed the public access to those facilities if Covid-19 took us to the place none of us wanted to go.