Professor Risteárd Ó Laoide:

There are time delays in it. Those time delays involve a lot of the stakeholders that are involved, including the companies and the HSE. Negotiations for pricing, which is critically important, also account for time delays. In the public sector, we work under the 2013 Act on pricing, which places a big onus on us to ensure that what we spend on drugs is not being taken away from other critically important elements of healthcare. That is a legal, statutory obligation.