Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)

The Taoiseach should put down the shovel at this stage if he is to follow the old maxim of the late Denis Healey that when one is in a hole, one should stop digging. He has not answered the question as to whether he has given some instruction to the HSE, in its independence, to continue with this system. The Tánaiste said the Government would throw its hands up if found out and if things have gone wrong.

I was sent a confidential memo by nurses from all over the country. Does the Taoiseach realise nurse managers and nursing staff were taken off overcrowded wards at busy periods to attend six mandatory four hour courses on this PPARS system? Does he realise the difficulties that created for patients, doctors and nurses, that is, to deal with a system which patently did not work? One nurse in Cork received an overpayment of €3,000. In a sample carried out by the former Midland Health Board, 43% of the sample had one or more errors on their payslip. Some 20 nurses in Wexford were overpaid as were nurses in Donegal. This system which the Government and the people in the Department of Health and Children were supposed to oversee is patently not working. Where were the systems to protect the taxpayer in respect of the consultants brought in to advise on how this should operate and who have been paid €50 million?

Will the review which will be carried out cover all aspects of what went on from the moment this project began? Will it cover the whole business of recruitment? Will we find out who were the experts brought into this country from outside on a regular basis — some from as far away as South Africa? Will it cover all the recruitment given that some experts only turned up for work three days per week despite being paid €1,200 per day?

If the Taoiseach wants to know, as he should do, about what the people are, and were, talking, he should ask himself how he can defend the fact that last Christmas a major social bash was held in Sligo costing in excess of €40,000 to celebrate the ongoing progress of this scheme when the people attending it were all talking not only about its shallowness and vulgarity but about how money could be found to hold something such as that when in October of last year a good and decent man who lived 150 yards from Monaghan hospital died because he could not get into it because of a lack of money.

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