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

Does Mr. Horan not accept he is hamstrung in the public sector in the competition to be the best? Money is taken from the public sector and put into the private sector. There are many people who cannot afford to access the private sector and jump the queue in the way that some people do. It is proposed to put money into the private sector where money is top-sliced off for profit and the responsibility of a chief executive is to shareholders rather than patients. The responsibility of the people who run the public service is to patients, the public purse and the Minister.

Does Mr. Horan take my point? The acting chief executive said, in his opinion, that the private sector was more efficient. I do not believe that is the case. There are all sorts of reasons one might be able to say that, but it has to do with cherry-picking rather than efficiency. The very existence of a mechanism to siphon money from the public sector and put it directly into the private sector is hampering the public sector.

In the long term, we will not address waiting lists in the public sector, even if such a policy has a very temporary short-term impact, as it did several years ago. However, it did not have a long-term impact. We are dealing with the aftermath of what was most definitely not a long-term solution.