Ms Susan Cliffe:

That would be my assessment of the issue in the knowledge that I have about that centre. If I take a step back, early in the pandemic we contacted the HSE in relation to 15 of its centres that we had concerns about. We had concerns because one had large numbers of people living in nightingale-type wards, that is, living, eating and spending most of their time inside in the same room.

The facility the Deputy is talking about was one of those centres. Of those 19, very quickly four of those centres closed and the residents were moved to better facilities which had been coming on stream anyway. Actually, one of them was not coming on stream. It has since come on stream. We expedited the registration of that centre on the understanding that there was already Covid in the existing centre.