Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

All of this was not entirely new. The Minister's attention was drawn to the problems in Portlaoise in this regard when Dr. Peter Naughton wrote a letter to the Department two years ago. The Minister passed the letter on for answer by the HSE as if it were a routine parliamentary question. We are not talking about accountability for administrative issues. In the past, we have debated missing files in the Office of the Attorney General. Officials have resigned in Britain because CDs containing personal information have gone missing. We are talking about a life-threatening disease that kills hundreds of women, including young women who leave behind young children, every year. This disease thrives on delay, but all we are getting in response to this issue is delay. Two years after the Minister first heard there was a problem in Portlaoise, and three months after the misdiagnosis came to public attention, we still have no explanation for what has happened.

I agree with Deputy Howlin that we should not expect the Minister, Deputy Harney, to take the blame for every wrong clinical decision that is made by individual doctors. When things go wrong, however, I expect the Minister to produce an explanation of what happened. After ten years in office, the Government should have put in place a health system in which things like this do not happen and in which there is a proper flow of information and communication. This motion is not about giving the Minister clinical blame — it is about how she has discharged her duties, for which she has legal responsibility under the Health Act 2004 and the Ministers and Secretaries Acts. Some idea of the Minister for Health and Children's ministerial style can be gleaned from a reply she gave to a parliamentary question some time ago:

I do not attend management meetings, nor did I do so in the previous Department. I believe that is the role of the management in the Department, although we have policy meetings with officials and so on.

If the Minister takes this kind of a hands-off approach to the running of her Department, if she acts like some kind of semi-detached non-executive director, then she can only expect to have got what she got last Wednesday; a Department under her control which is out of control; an agency which she set up which does not appear to be under anybody's control and patients who are not getting the quality of health service which they deserve and for which the taxpayers are paying.

I move that this House vote no confidence in the Minister for Health and Children.

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