Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)
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I will return to the issue of private hospitals. Most of us accept that it was the right road to go down, but many looking in found it frustrating that many of the hospitals were not being fully utilised. There was a lack of flexibility within the HSE or the Department. Somebody should have called stop and said that we need to use the private hospitals for something. That was not going on and was frustrating to many looking in at the system. We would like to think that we learn from these mistakes in case we are ever in that situation again. The HSE seems to be such a monolith that no one was able to make that decision. Would the Minister accept that as a fair analysis of what happened, particularly in the first lockdown?