James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael)

I will start by taking up where Deputy Shatter finished. The Minister did me the courtesy of sending me the letter from the Attorney General. He said the advice was privileged and should not be released. He did not say that it could not or cannot be released. It is at the discretion of the Government and it could have been released under certain restrictions to me and other members of the Opposition, but the Minister chose not to do so. This leads us to believe that there is little reference in the advice to co-location. From my conversation with the Minister at the briefing last week, the substantive advice was that this was to underpin the vires of 19 bodies; it had nothing to do with co-location, the Medical Practitioners Act or the HSE, per se.

How many co-located hospitals will not be for-profit? The Government failed to deliver 3,000 beds over a six-year period, as promised. However, the Minister wants us to believe that the public private partnership, the co-location plan, will deliver 1,000 beds and is the quickest, most effective and efficient way of doing so. What is the basis of that premise? Having listened to Deputy Shatter, and from what I and the Minister know, there is gross underuse and misuse of beds in the system because of inappropriate placement.

This policy tries to dislocate those who pay for the services with their taxes, the better off in society, from those who use it most, the elderly, many of whom do not have great income, and the chronically ill who, by dint of their illness, do not have great income. This will accelerate the demise of the public hospital service as the divide gets greater and greater and the funds are funnelled in. One of the reasons we have uproar about the accident and emergency crisis, which remains a crisis, is that every citizen must go through the doors of accident and emergency units. When the day comes that those who can afford it can go to the finery up the road, while Joe Bloggs, Johnny Murphy and Theresa Smith must use the public system, the divide will get greater and greater. We will end with the system of our American cousins' system, the most iniquitous. They spend 16% of GNP as opposed to our 8.5% on health care, yet 18,000 people die each year because of an inability to pay for health care. That is not a system we want, nor one that 56% of the population voted for in the general election. The Green Party must look at itself when it votes on this tonight. I wonder how the party can marry its words before the election with its actions tonight, when it vehemently opposed co-location.

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