We flew to Dublin on 27 October 1968. Rooms had been booked at the Montrose Hotel, on the main road from Dublin to Stillorgan. Paddy Lynch met us there, and advised me to organise where I was going to live, to buy a car, get to know my way around Dublin and only then should I begin work. I bought a map of Dublin and an Opel Kadett and within a few days had found a house to rent in Woodbine Road, adjacent to the Montrose. Maria was fully occupied in looking after Gordon, now five, and Elizabeth, just two, and appeared to be adjusting well to life in Dublin, although she greatly missed her friends in Port Elizabeth and was lonely while I was at work.

During our first few weeks we were greatly helped by Michael Fogarty, the director, and Maura Dempsey, the secretary, of the Economic and Social Research Institute of Ireland, who took the newly founded Medico-Social Research Board under their wing. As an office, I rented a room at 65 Merrion Square, a beautiful Georgian house, and bought a desk, chairs and a filing cabinet. My first task was to find a good secretary and, after interviewing a number of applicants, I found a capable personal assistant, Hilda McLoughlin.

In these early days, Shaun Trant, assistant secretary at the Department of Health, acted as the official secretary to the board. He arranged a board meeting at which I was asked what I considered to be the priorities for the board. I had consulted Cyril Joyce, the chief Medical Officer of Health, and Donal McCarthy, the director of the Central Statistics Office, and said that in order to study health we first needed to know what brought people in Ireland to consult their general practitioners, for what illnesses people were admitted to the general and to the psychiatric hospitals and, lastly, what were the major causes of death in Ireland.