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

I take the opportunity to echo the words of the Minister with regard to the Ukrainian issue.

I welcome the Minister, the Minister of State and their colleagues to the meeting. The Department of Health has faced many challenges in the past couple of years and in the past year, in particular. It has done well in very challenging circumstances, despite being a Department that received a great deal of criticism. Everybody knows best, everybody sits on the fence and everybody makes the commendation afterwards. The comments usually come afterwards, but not beforehand. I sympathise with the Minister on what he has to do.

This year will be the biggest test of the Department. How will it restore the health services to what the people expect, given the level of expenditure in the health services, the number of patients on waiting lists and bed waiting lists and given orthopaedic requirements? How does one, in the shortest possible time, bring around the Department to face those challenges, put them on the front line and deal with them, as they arise? How does one do so in a way that encourages the public, recognises its concern about the issue and recognises that there is a shortage of nurses in Australia, London and other places?

The message there is that it is a heavy and daunting job. It is a job for people who are dedicated to it. We should recognise the work done by the health service in the daunting jobs over the past couple of years, the jobs people did and how well they did them. However, what we do from here on in is important and it must be recognised that a number of high-profile people resigned over the co-ordination between the proposed Sláintecare programme and the health programme, as it is to be.

The two must converge. There must be an identification of convergence. We do not know what will happen as a result of moving apart from one another. We look for reassurance that the two will converge, the people who had concerns will have had them addressed and that the issues now remaining are within the capacity of the Department, the Minister, the Ministers of State and their officials to deliver.