Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is all fair. I do not think the HSE would do the same again if put in the same situation. It is obviously easy for all of us to talk about it now. Could or should what the Chairman has just said have happened? Could people have stepped in and said that we need to get the utilisation rates up? Along with the Chairman and Deputy Kenny, I was advocating for exactly that. At the start, there was not a lot of it but the HSE, in fairness, was trying to do something that no one had ever done before. It took over an entire hospital sector. There were legal and IR implications and all sorts of different implications. As quickly as it could, the HSE began to get the volumes up. I was getting replies to parliamentary questions showing that the volumes of care were going up, although they did not at the start. Perhaps it could have worked better. The Chairman will remember the pressure the HSE was under in taking over a whole hospital system and having it ready overnight. We were all afraid of the worst-case scenario in which our public hospitals filled up and we would end up with thousands of Covid-19 patients quickly filling up the private hospitals as well. The Army was setting up tents in car parks. That needed to be looked at, and it has been, to inform our current talks with the private hospitals. We need to be cognisant of what was going on at the time.