Ms Eilísh Hardiman:

If I may, part of the accountability is being here today and answering the questions to the best of my ability. I am happy to do that and come before any of the Oireachtas committees as a public servant. I accept there were weaknesses. I have apologised for those particular weaknesses. We have put in structures and processes to try to address them so the recommendations are being implemented by the actions. There is a lot of work to be done. It was not all perfect – absolutely not – but there are a lot of challenges related to merging hospitals. As a new entity, two of our first years were very unusual, to be quite honest, with a pandemic and a cyberattack that brought on greater stresses. What we were trying to do, and we are definitely in a better space now, was have integration, standardisation and a single governance process. In the early parts of CHI, because we set it up that way, we had hospitals that had to move from being hospital-centric or being hospital site-orientated to being single and that is quite complex. It takes time to actually-----