Dr. Tony Holohan:

There are very significant plans that both the Minister and the HSE have in relation to it. NPHET is not a part of the planning of all of that. The HSE in the first instance must put in place plans to begin to re-establish services, as Deputy Burke rightly said, as quickly as it reasonably can. That is necessary given the significant volume of activity because of the backlog that will have developed, of necessity, in terms of access to some services while capacity within the hospital system was impacted both by dealing with Covid and the need to maintain measures to try to prevent transmission of Covid. As I am sure Deputy Burke knows, the Omicron variant we have dealt with, and are still dealing with, has much greater capacity for easy spread in hospital environments, so-called nosocomial transmission, so the HSE has had to maintain a very high standard of infection prevention and control measures to protect patients in particular.