Mr. John McKeon:

The Department was impacted on a number of fronts. The General Register Office was impacted because a lot of notifications come through the HSE system. The General Register Office is part of the Department but the general registration service is run by the HSE with the registrars around the country. That led to some delays, which was unfortunate. With reporting at the time, people were relying on RIP.iefor the numbers of deaths and so on. We could not get the numbers of deaths because they were not coming through that process. That was one element. The other element related to certificates. Rather than terminating somebody's payment when a certificate did not come in, we extended it.