Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

Whatever number was promised, not even two, never mind 200,000, have been issued. Such announcements are made and the date for the issuing of these cards is moved forward and then moved forward again. Not one of them has been delivered.

People from my home town and from other regions who have to travel long distances for cancer treatment are angry when they see hundreds of millions of euro wasted. Yet we tell them we cannot afford to provide cancer treatment in the regions. There are so many ways in which such money could be properly spent that such wastage annoys people. There is never an accounting for such wastage. Nobody is responsible for the e-voting fiasco or the opening of Media Lab that were announced with great fanfare and then disappeared, so to speak. The attitude is that nobody is responsible and so what. Nobody was responsible for the National Aquatic Centre, the roof of which blew off. We are the only country in the world where our National Aquatic Centre is an outdoor pool. Nobody is responsible for the computer systems which cost multiples of the original estimated cost and which simply do not deliver, but the attitude of Government is "who cares". It uses the Bart Simpson style defence, "Nobody saw me, you cannot prove it and it was not me."

I want to deal with the issue highlighted in the Comptroller and Auditor General's report on the national treatment purchase scheme. Chapter 14 of that report acknowledges that in 1993 I introduced the precursor of this scheme, the waiting list initiative. I wanted to introduce an emergency scheme to deal with the backlog of waiting lists by negotiating within the State and externally for operations to be done in order that procedures could be carried out. I negotiated for that within the State and as far away as Belfast, and people were helicoptered from Cork. That was a short-term initiative to tackle waiting lists while we built up the capacity in the public health service to deliver within this State. What the Government has done is to change that into a permanent scheme. There is a problem in doing that, and I wish I had more time to develop this point. The problem is in buying procedures from hospitals whose waiting lists are generating the demand. In the report the Comptroller and Auditor General asked how hospitals have a waiting list problem for a given procedure at a time when they have a capacity to undertake a substantial number of additional treatments funded by the national treatment purchase fund. There is an extraordinary dichotomy in trying to square that circle. That is an extraordinary and fair question.

In my last comment in what could have been a long speech on an important report, I wish to say the following to the Minister, Deputy Noel Dempsey. Unfortunately, I cannot say it to him face to face because he has left the House. Having delivered his salvo, he does not want to hear a response. He talked about all the harbour development and so on. I live a few miles from Kilmore Quay, where his decision has destroyed a community of scallop fishermen. When will they get compensation and when will the funding which he is able to slosh around with no accountability be available to give real relief to the people whose lives he has destroyed?

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