Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On this, I disagree. The health service, as we all know, is a huge national system. It is incredibly complex and there are thousands of competing priorities in every part of the country. As a Minister, you have to make some calls on the most important points of focus; you just have to do that. For the first year and a half, it was pretty straightforward. It was Covid, and the system responded incredibly well. Consider what I covered this morning in my opening statement. I have a waiting list action plan, because that is a top Government priority. I have an urgent and emergency care plan and a team that meets and that I meet every month, because that is a top priority. I also have a productivity task force in place now. We are escalating its prominence partly because we have a bit of space. For me, the first two priorities are to get the waiting list down and get the number of patients on trolleys down. That has now built momentum. We need to keep a very close eye on it, and we do that through the two action plans. The women's health agenda was really important to me. In this regard, we set up a women's health task force and a women's health action plan. Really, it is a political decision rather than a HSE decision-----