Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I would prefer the public sector to be delivering significant elements within society than for the private sector to be doing so. However, I believe that under the management of this Government, we do not have the efficiencies we should be getting from the public sector. The Minister mentioned accountability. The Secretary General of the Department of Health was before this committee a number of months ago and I asked him if, in his recollection, anybody at the senior levels of the Department or in that sector had ever lost his or her job for not fulfilling a role properly and he said "No". You can bet your bottom dollar there is not a section of the private sector where that is the case. We can go back and forth on this issue but I have only a few minutes and I want to get to the other sections if I can.

I wish to talk about the amount of money the State is paying through the State Claims Agency, which is a big expenditure we are not focusing on enough. I found a response to a parliamentary question that stated that, within a five-year period, 500,000 people experienced adverse incidents, such as accidents, etc., within the health service. The Department of Health told me 3,150 people had lost their lives as a result of accidents that happened within the public service in a five-year period. In the same time period, €1.5 billion was paid out in compensation. I just looked at the amount of money the State is allocating to the State Claims Agency annually. When Fine Gael came into government in 2011, the State was allocating €60 million per year to the State Claims Agency for it to deal with its costs, etc. Last year, the State was providing €500 million for claims. I am absolutely sure that no matter how well run a system is, there will always be mistakes that are not anybody's fault and the State will have to cover the costs. I accept that. However, the trend shows a radical acceleration of the money the State is now providing to the State Claims Agency to deal with compensation payouts from the State due to mistakes made within the Department of Health. I want to make it clear that the nurses and doctors are doing their damnedest. I say that from the start. We know, however, there is a massive amount of pressure on them because of understaffing with departments, etc., which is making it more difficult for them to deliver on their work. It is interesting there has rightly been a lot of talk about the national children's hospital, but two or three years ago, the money being paid out in claims would have wiped out the entire cost of that hospital. The Minister might address that issue.