Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)

We all knew that this Government was in disarray in its stewardship of the health services but this motion shows clearly that it has lost the plot altogether. Yesterday 331 patients were on trolleys and chairs in accident and emergency units in this State. That is the most telling answer to this bizarre, self-congratulatory motion from the Tánaiste and Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Harney. It would be laughable if we were not dealing with such a tragic situation for people who suffer daily in our hospitals. One must wonder at the real reason the Government decided to introduce the motion. It may well be the spin-off effect I highlighted earlier today in the course of the Order of Business.

The Tánaiste and her colleagues must take the people for fools. She recently described the situation in accident and emergency units as a national emergency. At the IMO conference last weekend the Minister of State, Deputy Seán Power, spoke of the "perceived flaws" in the health system and said that highlighting these "helped to create a false impression of a health system in crisis". So, on the one hand, the Tánaiste states we have a national emergency while, on the other, the Minister State says there is no crisis.

The reality known only too well to people the length and breadth of this country is that we have had a crisis for years, not just this past winter or since the Minister, Deputy Harney, took up the health portfolio. This reality translates all too sadly into thousands of individual crises for patients and their families. People are being subjected to the dangers and indignities of overcrowded and often chaotic accident and emergency units year on year, with the situation worsening every winter. In the first three months of 2006 there has been a daily average of 300 patients on chairs and trolleys in accident and emergency units.

I commend the Irish Nurses Organisation on keeping the public informed of this through its Trolley Watch. This is in contrast to the HSE and the Minister's office, which wish to conceal the real extent of suffering in our hospitals. In that regard, in certain hospitals patients on trolleys are now being accommodated in designated rooms or wards. They are still accident and emergency patients who are not admitted to a proper ward and still waiting for a proper bed, but patients in such rooms or wards are not included in daily figures for trolley-bound patients.

There is no mention of a national emergency in the Government motion, nor of one of the most essential measures needed to address the accident and emergency crisis, namely, a fully resourced plan to provide the 3,000 additional public hospital beds required in the system. That figure is not plucked from the sky but in the Government's health strategy published in 2001, yet there is no plan to provide those beds. There has not even been a proper audit of beds, an assessment of bed needs.

The Tánaiste's solution to the bed shortage is one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated on the Irish people. She quite rightly tells us that private beds are heavily subsidised by the State in the public hospital system and that those beds should be public beds. She is right about that, but her solution is to pour even more public money into the private health business through tax breaks for developers of private, profit-driven hospitals and gifts of land at public hospital sites. She claims that will free 1,000 beds in public hospitals, yet she does not tell us when or where we will see these beds. To achieve that alleged aim, the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats Government reinforces the two-tier public private apartheid in our health services. The Tánaiste pursues a privatisation agenda, rewarding the greed of those who see the health service first and foremost as a profitable business rather than as a basic right to which all are equally entitled — I emphasise — on the basis of need alone.

As the Sinn Féin amendment to the Government motion states, all Government spending on health services should be on the public system only. The money spent on tax breaks for developers of private hospitals together with the money wasted on the HSE's failed computer systems would already have funded 1,000 acute hospital beds in the public system.

The accident and emergency crisis has also been compounded by the closure of such units in smaller hospitals, including in Monaghan and Dundalk in my region. Those services should be restored as part of the overall measures needed to address both the immediate crisis and the longer-term reform of health services. On behalf of the Sinn Féin Deputies, I urge all Members to reject the Government motion and support the Sinn Féin amendment as the real alternative.

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