John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister and the Secretary General. Context is everything. I have always tried to be non-partisan on this and I will continue in that vein. In a non-partisan way, there are two or three issues that strike me about this. First, the Minister is just a year and a half in the job, so much of the narrative around Sláintecare would have preceded his time in office. Second, Mr. Watt is barely a wet week in the job and the consequences have landed on his table. Third, as Mr. Watt said, we are hopefully emerging from a global pandemic. That is the context. To be honest, and I do not mean to be trite about it, part of me wondered about what all this excitement is about Sláintecare right now, given what we have been going through and given what the health system has had to cope with and deal with, and what all the HSE staff and healthcare workers have had to do. That is my objective overview of it.

When a Minister says he is putting the chief executive of the HSE, who, for a period, nationalised a load of private hospitals to deal with the pandemic and, so, has just garnered a load of experience in the provision of universal public healthcare in a particular context, and then the Minister also says that, with the Secretary General of his Department, these two individuals are going to take charge of the implementation of Sláintecare under his political direction, that is about a big a statement as it gets in regard to the commitment of a Government to a particular policy initiative that emerged from an all-party Oireachtas report. I imagine that a Government, regardless of what political hue it is in the future, would do well to follow that.

I have one caveat. The Minister is bringing everything back to the centre, and I see the necessity for that in the circumstances. How does he propose to withstand the accusation that the regional structure is the way to go when he is bringing everything back to the centre?