Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

I do not have a piece of work under way on procurement, other than in relation to the ventilators. That is the additional piece of work I am doing. We commenced a piece of work around HSE procurement of PPE but because the HSE had already commissioned KPMG to do a piece of work looking at the procurement processes and so on, I decided not to proceed with that examination pending the receipt of the KPMG work. It is actually quite a good piece of work. There are lessons to be learned there in relation to procurement, so I would not propose doing additional work at this stage on PPE procurement.

On the report I will be publishing on Thursday, a number of chapters in it deal with the expenditure as a result of Covid-19 but it is more to do with schemes than with procurement. For example, I have chapters on the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, and the temporary wage subsidy scheme, TWSS. I also have a chapter giving an overview of where the expenditure was as a result of Covid restrictions in the first year of their operation.