Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

I totally disagree with that. There are people better qualified than me to say there is no real evidence that any amount of planning in any country, certainly not in Europe, would have managed to fully deal with what was faced at the time. The evidence is that Ireland Inc., in terms of excess mortality and the financial report, performed reasonably well. The excess mortality is something you would not wish for; however, while we had 12.5 deaths per 100,000, the EU figure was close to 300 and the UK figure was ten times 12.5. By any measure, it is by no means clear or certain that planning at any level could have dealt with the issue. This is something to be looked at in the future. I certainly do not agree that there was a breakdown in the HSE. The HSE manages risk every day. We chose to put patient risk ahead of financial and procurement risk. We took more financial and procurement risk to manage patient risk. We could just as easily be sitting here having an inquiry about why we did not have enough ventilators.