Mr. Robert Watt:

That would have been the intention, that the CMO would have led the research collaboration across different players within the university sector - the different public health departments across the different universities. The whole idea was Dr. Holohan would be there to identify what the priorities would be, and to get people to come together as teams and to then send in bids to the HRB to figure out who the best people would be to do the research.

I think the scale of this funding in the context of what we have been through is something which does not seem to get any coverage. We spent €40 billion on a response and I think the EU is spending €5.3 billion on research funding. If we are 1% of the euro economy, 1 % of that is €50 million. We are underspending here and we need to improve our preparedness. That is the key thing here. That is what we are trying to do. This is motivated all the time by public interest. We were trying to do something which we thought was in the public interest, to enhance our ability to prepare for the next pandemic and to have, what we thought, was an eminently qualified person leading this. That is what we were trying to do.