Liam Twomey (Wexford, Fine Gael)

The saddest aspect of the health services throughout 2005 and continuing into 2006 is that Fianna Fáil has finally thrown in the towel on providing any form of health service. It is allowing the Progressive Democrats to privatise everything in the health service, including out-of-hours services and home help services, and public hospitals are on the road to being privatised. If the Minister had bothered to carry out a cost benefit analysis of the ongoing running costs of these facilities, he would understand it is not a great way to spend public money.

The best way to develop private medicine is to let the new private hospitals compete with each other and with the public service. Supersizing the present uncompetitive private system by band-aiding it on to an inefficient public system will not work in the long term. It will be disastrous in the short term as far as taxpayers are concerned. Neither patients nor taxpayers will benefit from this system. The €200 million which will be forgone in tax concessions to provide 1,000 beds will be a drop in the ocean compared to the ongoing running costs of these hospitals. It amazes me that Fianna Fáil, which claims to be so socialist-minded, is allowing this development to go ahead without a major public debate. It surprises me that it has disregarded the importance of the health service to the people of this country. It also amazes me that senior civil servants in the Department of Finance, who should know better, are putting their names to these types of proposals and allowing the Minister, Deputy Cowen, to just rubber-stamp the proposals. This is a huge amount of money and what could happen in the future is of serious concern to taxpayers.

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