Mr. Martin Fraser:

I beg the Chairman's pardon but these issues are all sort of interlinked in my mind, so the committee might forgive me for that. The man the Deputy is talking about was appointed to the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science when the Government was formed, as I mentioned. What happened at the Department of Health, because of the pandemic and the extremely difficult circumstances, was an acting Secretary General was appointed. One can see from the note of the meeting in October that the first option under consideration was to ask the acting Secretary General to stay on for an extended period, but in fact that meant perhaps until the summer of this year or until there was some sense of the pandemic coming to an end, which is obviously difficult to predict. The other option was a transfer and a Top-Level Appointments Committee, TLAC, competition.

In short, the man in question moved on the day Deputy Micheál Martin became Taoiseach and Deputy Harris became Minister at the Department, and thereafter, what we would do about the Department of Health was always an open question. The acting Secretary General was clear that he was happy to serve for as long as he was asked to serve, and he did so with great distinction. We knew we would have to make a permanent appointment to that Department at some point. It was really the pandemic. There is never a good time to make these big changes and it certainly was not a good time last autumn.