Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

What worries me is that I have heard capital planning mentioned three or four times. This is all supposed to have been dealt with in the context of capital planning if we are doing our job. We must have advance planning. If we do not have it, we will not know what we are going to do, what will happen down the road, or what embarrassing situation will pop up out of the woodwork. I am sorry to have to say this but that is not acceptable. That is a very serious flaw in the administration of the system. If anything else in the HSE is being dealt with in the same fashion, there will be further and more embarrassing issues arising in the future. I make my appeal again, and I do not want the capital plan as the response. The Waterford issue should have been dealt with in the capital plan, and presumably it was, but there was some type of glitch in the system.

I deal with glitches in the system every day. I do not report them all but many of them should not occur at all if we are running business the way it should be run. That means there should be nothing pending which is likely to present a flaw in the delivery of the services that we are expected to deliver. Going back to 20, 30 or 40 years ago, at least we could do something about it then, and if a report was done last week, it would all be done and dealt with. I realise there was a response to it, but there should have been a response long before this happened. I cannot understand why that did not happen.