Josepha Madigan (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)
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I congratulate Deputy Shortall on her appointment and I am looking forward to working on this committee. My background is not in medical health but in law; however, that is not necessarily bad, because one may see the issues on an objective level. We all know how the health system works. I hope to feed this back to the committee.

From an aspirational perspective, members know that universal health care was eventually abandoned. I know approximately 47% of the population has private health insurance and 46% of people have medical cards. We must be careful about what we are promising, as Deputy Kelleher alluded to earlier, from a practical perspective, and take care not to over-reach. I will endeavour to do all I can, but we must watch the budget from that perspective.

From a practical perspective, there are micro- and macro-issues.

On a constituency level, I have already been lobbied by particular stakeholders wishing to contribute and have their say. I wonder if the Chairman wishes us to meet such groups by ourselves and feed it back to the committee or should every group be represented in front of all members. One of the issues I have with committees in general is they end up being a talking shop. Will the Chairman assign specific tasks to particular members of the committee in order to bring about movement? That is instead of just talking every week - or whenever we sit - about what we are doing. On a practical level, as this is set up for a finite period, I suggest that we be strategic in how we approach the process. There can be many lofty notions in speaking about health but we must bring that back to the micro level. I am prepared to do whatever it takes from my perspective to help the committee in that regard.