Mr. Philip Watt:

I certainly think that if we have a system that everybody can trust it would reduce the amount of advocacy. Fundamentally, what we are saying is the system needs to be more than tweaked, which is the standard response from the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics and the Government. The change needs to be more fundamental with regard to the health technology assessment process and afterwards. This is the point Deputy Donnelly raised with regard to transparency after the process. When we drew up our documents we tried to find a flowchart of the drug approval system in Ireland but we could not find one. There is none on the HSE website. We had to make it up based on what we guessed.