James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

If the Deputy has a specific case in mind, he should provide me with the details. As I stated, we will catch up and there will be fairness and equity across the system by the end of the year. We will also catch up with our inpatient elective procedures by the end of the year.

Deputy Seamus Healy also referred to the outpatients list. This was an unintentional oversight. This is the first Government that has been determined to expose this problem to the light of day. It is astonishing that no previous Government ever counted the numbers on outpatient waiting lists. The real scandal is not the 386,000 people on the waiting lists but the 16,000 who have been waiting for longer than four years. We have undertaken that by the end of this year no one will have to wait longer than one year. We will deal with this problem in the same way as we dealt with the problems of inpatient waiting times.