Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the many officials for attending and for their opening statements. While I know other Deputies have done so already, it is worth thinking back to the context for this. We were faced with an unprecedented global pandemic and the political landscape was such that we were in an interregnum. We had held a general election but a new government had not been formed. That is probably pertinent in that some of what could be described as the looseness of procurement processes might not have been thus had there been a permanent government in situ. I am not sure if that is true but what we have seen reminds me of the quote from Mike Tyson, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth". All across the globe we saw that whatever emergency plans and emergency systems were put in place were stress tested beyond anyone's expectations.

I would not say that this means that there is no point in crying over spilt milk. I will come back later to the spilt milk element because a significant amount of public money has been wasted through this procurement process but the most important aspect is the lessons to be learnt. The emergency response procurement system has been stress tested in a way that none of us could have anticipated and lessons must be learned from this.

One thing that leapt out from the page for me was the issue of a centralised assets register. Do we now have a centralised assets register? What steps have been taken to put one in place? How was the assets registers maintained at the time? Was it by hospital group or by healthcare area? Are the registers on compatible systems? We hear again and again that we have incompatible systems that will not talk to one another. If that was, or still is, the case then it is something that needs to be resolved.