Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses and thank them for their presentations. On the last topic, all of that has been in the public domain for quite some time. It is a bit ironic to hear the Secretary General saying we accept that there are problems with the system for agreeing budgets and that they need to change.

The system is largely a result of the attitude of and approach taken by the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, or DPENDPR as it is called. I have already said that Department seems to forget the "R" in DPENDPR stands for "Reform". The carry-on at the start of the year was outrageous and we ended up losing the chair of the audit and risk committee of the HSE, who was very clear about what was going on here, namely, the attempts to massage the figures and pretend there was not a €2 billion black hole in the service plan. The service plan was delayed for about three months, or even more, as a result of this. We saw all the back and forth between the Secretary General and the then CEO of the HSE. These are funny figures to a large extent. I would be surprised if the deficit at the end of the year was only €1.1 billion.

What we have to look at against that figure is the performance of the HSE on recruitment and the spending of moneys committed at the start of the year. My concern is obviously that patient services are going to be impacted. There was back-and-forth between the Department and the HSE in March where it was said these are the figures but patient services are not to be impacted. To make that happen is an impossible task given there was that level of shortfall. I am going to leave it at that. It is a very unsatisfactory situation. It is an entirely unsatisfactory way of agreeing budgets. Again, the approach and culture within the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform has a lot to answer for. If we are going to meet the need for services posed by a growing population, an ageing population and a significant element of reform being implemented, such as reducing costs for service users, there will be significant additional cost involved in that and reform has to be funded. We have said that from the beginning with the Sláintecare committee. If we want reform we have to fund it. That is why the point has been made often about the folly of cutting taxes when we are trying to reform public services, because the public are better off having better public services.