Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

I am glad I had finished the quote then. That quotation is fairly representative of the view of health professionals in nursing and other white collar professional grades, consultants and doctors. Last week I quoted for the Taoiseach the statement on behalf of accident and emergency consultants who said that not only would we have a two-tier health system but we would also have a two-tier casualty system. The Taoiseach tore up his own health strategy to provide 3,000 beds in favour of this new shift towards for-profit medicine. The Irish people do not want an American for-profit health model. They know that we badly need the land concerned to provide community care and step-down beds to take people who are inappropriately occupying beds in acute hospitals out of the hospitals, thus putting them into that kind of care and freeing up beds in the acute hospitals. The Taoiseach is going in the opposite direction, however. Everybody is counselling him against it, including his backbenchers who are excessively glum about this, and properly so. As this is likely to be the Taoiseach's last time on Leaders' Questions, will he permit that, as Head of Government, to satisfy a crazy Progressive Democrats ideology?

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