Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)

It is unfair of the Taoiseach to say that Opposition Members run down the frontline staff in the health service. We recognise the pressure they are under. We recognise the job they do. The Taoiseach should remember that the people did not elect the HSE. They elected the Government. What we have now is a single person Government where every member of the Cabinet believes whatever the Taoiseach says, whether it is right or wrong.

The figures in regard to the National Treatment Purchase Fund that the Taoiseach mentioned are sanitised. They refer only to surgical cases. They do not refer to medical cases. Nor do they refer to the fact that there are huge waiting lists to see doctors in the first instance. One member of the Cabinet, the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív, who is absent this morning, said that the HSE is a complete shambles, that it is impossible to deal with it.

The ratio of persons working in the HSE is interesting. There are nine national directors and 61 assistant national directors. That is nearly seven to one. When Professor Drumm addressed this parliamentary party a number of years ago in Portlaoise he said there are 2,500 persons working in our system who do not know what their job is, who do not know where they fit into the system and who will be paid for life. The Taoiseach tells me we have a world class health system. Consultants and nurses tell me that people on the end of waiting lists are dying because they cannot access the service. Do the Taoiseach and the members of his Cabinet who believe everything he says accept any responsibility for ensuring there is real efficiency in delivering to patients the care they deserve and for which they pay, and that there are more services and less administration? The Taoiseach agreed with me earlier this year that there is an obscene bulge in the administrative recruitment sections of the HSE compared with the number of nurses and doctors in the front line who are needed to give patients the first class frontline service they deserve. Does the Taoiseach accept responsibility to ensure that taxpayers, who are now spending €15,000 million, will be happy in the knowledge that they are getting an efficient, professional service that is patient-centred and does not deal in the kind of sanitised version of a health service the Taoiseach talks about from the lofty heights of the Office of the Taoiseach?

See this speech in context