Ms Angela Fitzgerald:

There is quite a bit in that. I will go back to why HIQA was chosen. Our object is to promote health quality for the people of the country. All of the work Mr. Egan does on inspection is with a safety lens. The prompt for this work was safety. Everybody is familiar with the backdrop. Senator Collins spoke very well about her direct experience. In that context, we were very familiar with Limerick. In our reports, as far back as 2023, we elucidated very clearly both the capacity challenges and operational challenges. We understood the landscape. We like to think we understand what the critical success factors are for safe and effective functioning of emergency departments. That is at the heart of this.

In anything we do, we are not the subject matter experts for everything we do. For every piece of work Dr. Ryan does, she convenes an expert advisory group. That is good practice because you cannot be an expert in everything, but we have considerable experience in harnessing that expertise, and the right expertise, to support our work. It is our job to then make an independent assessment after taking all that expertise. The specific task the Minister asked us to do in this instance was to provide advice and not to provide recommendations because there are policy considerations here that are beyond our role. What we tried to set out was to give the Minister and the Government as much insight into the factors she should consider when taking that advice for each of those options.

That is what our job was. To the extent that we are constantly evolving, we are now moving into the area of critical entities - resilience. Mr. Egan and I are working with the Department on taking on a role in relation to cybersecurity. Therefore, our role as a regulator is constantly evolving.