Ms Emily O'Reilly:

-----go in, get the information and publish it. That is the critical thing.

On face masks, I was always fascinated by the face masks issue because, to me, it seemed blindingly obvious that we should be wearing them. I looked at my Amazon bill for last year, which was distressingly large, to see when I first bought face masks. I first ordered them on 28 February, which was before we were advised to do so. I am not saying I am a genius and prescient but, to me, as a reasonably intelligent human being, it seemed obvious that we should have been wearing face masks. I was always puzzled as to the approach. At the beginning, NPHET, the WHO and the ECDC were almost counter-indicating their use, suggesting they do more harm than good. The ECDC was effectively saying "No" at a certain point and three weeks later it was saying "Yes", and now we are all wearing masks. I am in Strasbourg, where they are worn on the street. One wears them all the time. People talk about the science. The science on the virus was really simple: it is spread by aerosol, it is in the air, one breathes it in and gets the disease, and what happens, happens. Therefore, face masks were obvious. When the ECDC changed its advice it did not say why, and that is why we made the recommendation that, in future, it explain to people why it is changing advice on certain matters. I tune in to Irish media regularly and I quite frequently hear the ECDC being referred to. People understandably and rightly trust it but to really earn that trust, the advice it is giving and the decisions it is making have to be justified.

On the question on my office, it has approximately 70 staff. It is a tiny office. We get roughly 2,000 complaints every year. Many of them are not within our mandate but within that of the relevant member state's public administration so we would advise people accordingly. We open approximately 350 to 400 inquiries each year.

Some of those follow complaints and others are own-initiative systemic investigations. A recent one we carried out related to the ECDC.