Peter O'Dwyer

Yeah, it seems like you wait long enough every 10 to 12 years and were either decentralising or centralising again in the health service.

But he had his part to play in the latest round, yeah.

No, well, he certainly didn't poo-poo the idea that they were maybe a little too conservative or, you know, risk-taking wasn't enough in there.

He did, I suppose, kind of make the point of he's out of it a while and so he wouldn't be best placed to talk about it.

It's a balance, yeah.

And I think he did say that, that, you know, it is about striking that balance and maybe it's not always perfectly done.

A long way along.

And I learned quite a bit from the interview, just looking at the numbers.

He had the figure of 3,600 cases back in 23.

That's down to 1,300 now.

And they feel 1,200 is about the sweet spot to be able to get through them at a good pace.

When he talks about reaching the...

the turnaround times that aren't yet in law but will be soon and they're currently measuring themselves.

That all suggests that they're quite a long way down the road with it.

Couldn't happen quick enough given the importance of it all.

There are still some issues obviously as he highlighted, I mean when we were talking about the transposition of EU directives into Irish law and the one he gave the example of with the environmental

assessment or impact assessments that the EU law is 100,000 homes it needs to be done for and we went for 10,000.

Now I don't know enough about it to know which one of those is bad law but one of them is bad law.

It's back to the description of him at the start of like he's kind of a troubleshooter and one of these guys like some of the overhaul was kind of done or in train maybe by the time he got in but like as a government who do you want leading it?

Like he's one of the short list of people that and everything must seem...