Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The witnesses are very welcome to the committee. It is only fair that it should be put on the record that, on the whole, the HSE is doing a difficult job but it is well recognised among the public that the job is being done very well. Ms O'Beirne and her team deserve to be commended on that. I wish to put a number of questions to the witnesses.

In Ms O'Beirne's opening statement she spoke about the split between clinical expertise in the contact tracing structure and level 2, as she described it. It is supposed to be a 40:60 split. Is that split being achieved? If so, are the clinical people all from the HSE or have any of them at this stage been recruited outside of the public health system?

I would be interested to know how the HSE's customer service engagement is going. The HSE is obviously calling quite a number of people - I would think five on average for each positive case. How are the public responding? I get it that someone might be very upset to receive a call from one of the HSE's contact tracing people. What is the proportion of, say, difficult or aggressive engagements? Do the witnesses feel contact tracers are getting overwhelming co-operation or just average co-operation? As far as Ms O'Beirne's team's experience with this is concerned, do the witnesses feel there is buy-in from the people getting these calls pointing out that they have been identified as close contacts?

Those are my first questions. I will come back in later.