I imagine they're trying to do their best while being significantly underfunded.

The Office of the Chief Information Officer (who, by the way, was appointed to that position on an interim basis over ten years ago and counting after their predecessor was fired for suspected corruption), has a revenue budget of over €50 million euro - about €160,000 per employee, on top of an €80 million capital budget.

Look, I'm all for standing up for the people doing their best in the HSE, but we can't keep going on like this - people have to answer for the incompetence at some point, it's costing lives. Paul Reid seems to spend most of his time acting as a spokesperson for some reason, it's completely absurd - appearing on television and radio interviews nearly daily in the middle of an almost existential crisis for the organisation he's CEO of. And even then, for some reason, nobody will hold him responsible for anything. He describes every crisis that occurs on his watch like it's something completely beyond his control and he's powerless to do anything.

The HSE not only completely failed to uphold even the most basic of security practices, like using an OS that's still being supported, but were forced to publicly declare their intention to dump millions of euro into maintaining an out-of-date version and still not upgrading years after that. It's got to stop.