Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Last year, we received the briefing at 10 o'clock the night before. The health service is running over to the tune of approximately €500 million or €600 million per year of taxpayers' money. Men and women work their backsides off to earn the money in order that the State can pay it. There is yet again a massive overspend. The children's hospital is massively overspent. It is the job of the Oireachtas to interrogate the money. That is the job we are supposed to do today, but we received the information with zero time to interrogate it for the second year in a row. That says a great deal about the level of financial management and the view from within the Government as to how seriously it takes oversight of taxpayers' money. It is an outrageous insult to every person in the country who pays tax or uses the hospital system.

The money involved is not really €338 million. By my count, it is closer to €456 million because the €338 million includes a reduction of €45 million, due to a contract negotiation with the UK Government over treatment abroad schemes.

It has nothing to do with the provision of services. It is just an unexpected negotiating quirk and an accounting issue, which reduces the total amount required but does not reduce the amount overspent. When the additional €45 million is added back in to try to get to the overspend one gets the €383 million. Then there is the extraordinary line of €73 million which is also taken off the overspend for what they call time-related savings. I was curious to understand, in the limited time we had to interrogate the documents, what time-related savings are. It sounds like a good thing, that we have managed to reduce the overspend by €73 million through such savings. What it actually means is things that were meant to be done this year that did not happen. Going through the document, page 6 refers to the €73 million and says that time-related savings happen because facilities open later than they are supposed to, because negotiations to buy things take longer than they should and recruitment into designated roles does not happen as quickly as it should. That €73 million is, therefore, due to not doing things that the health service was meant to do and has nothing to do with the overspend. One must then add that figure back in. When the accounting quirk with the British Government is removed along with the item that is not a saving at all but is just not doing things on time, the overspend for running the show is north of €450 million.

Before we get into the detail, then, I have a question. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, said that the overrun in health this year and in previous years is so big that it threatens the entire financial picture and the financial stability of the country. It has done some very useful analysis on the overruns and their figures, not mine, are as follows: in 2005, the overspend was zero and there was no conversation on overruns; between 2006 and 2010, inclusive, it was also zero; between 2011 to 2013, inclusive, it started to increase to €200 million, €250 million, €300 million; and for the past few years it has been averaging €500 million a year. The current Minister came into office in 2016. Between 2015 and this year, the combined overrun is €2.3 billion. One question this committee must grapple with is how year after year, despite multi-billion euro increases to the health budget beyond anything that has ever been seen here or in other countries, waiting lists are getting longer? How is the Government spending more money at a phenomenal rate, up from about €12.5 billion in 2014 or 2015 to €18 billion next year but everything is getting so much worse so quickly for so many people? Part of the answer is the overruns. When one starts adding up €500 million a year one gets to several billion euro that is expended on plugging gaps in places, not on service provision. Before we get into the detail, what was going on that for the first five or six years of the HSE there were no overruns, then from 2011 they were modest and now we are up to annual averages of €500 million?