Mr. Paul Reid:

I thank the Deputy for his opening comments, which we will relay. Regarding his question about value for money for the consultancy costs and Deputy Verona Murphy's questions, we fully respect the role of the Committee of Public Accounts and the Oireachtas in general in holding us to account for all spend. Regarding consultancy costs, I believe we have got value for money. It is always something we will go through thoroughly again. I believe that €40 million out of our total spend of €20 billion is a fair representation of the skills, competencies and expertise that we recognise we do not have within the HSE and that we recognise we need for a period of time to, in some cases, contract for some services or deal with emergency situations with which we have had to deal in the course of the pandemic. I am always committed to building skills and competencies in-house. Certainly if we look at what is happening with testing and tracing, we have leveraged all that skill back in-house but we had to engage some expertise to get us there. It is a similar situation with the vaccination programme and across a range of services. I believe that we will always continue to search and get value for money to the greatest extent.