Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The extension of an automatic medical card to children whose parents are in receipt of domiciliary carer's allowance is very welcome. It is regrettable that it did not happen earlier. There is a considerable amount of political will. I said at the time that it was going to cost €17 million. When the budget allocated €10 million it was clear that there was no intention for this to come in quickly. Waiting until 1 June is time lost for a lot of people. That said, the measure is very welcome.

In regard to the winter initiative, he Minister has mentioned reduced attendances. That will not influence the number of people on trolleys, because a patient is not put on a trolley unless a doctor has made a decision to admit them.

On the figures before us, how are we to judge whether the winter initiative gives value for money? How will the winter initiative be analysed? I fully appreciate that the Minister is dealing with human beings not robots, so he cannot predict what will happen. One can say the 'flu happens every year, and we can park that, but crises will emerge. How will we judge whether the money allocated to the winter initiative has been effectively dispersed? We all see the trolley count. We see that it is unacceptably high. The current Minister is not the first to say that the trolley count is unacceptably high, one of predecessors stated it was a national emergency but the figure still did not reduce. How will we judge that we are getting a good return on the measures that have been pursued?