Dinny McGinley (Donegal South West, Fine Gael)

In the past three hours I have been in different parts of Dublin, visiting some of my constituents in hospital. I visited St. Vincent's Hospital and St. Luke's Hospital, where I went to visit one constituent and found almost half of my county were there. I sat outside the radiotherapy unit for 25 minutes with a neighbour who was waiting for treatment. The staff of the unit are working hard and it seems to operate from early morning until late at night. Despite the question mark over St. Luke's, anyone I spoke to there had nothing but praise and admiration for the work carried out by the staff.

With regard to co-location and public and private medicine, I may be very naive in that I believe the country can tolerate both systems — we can have private medicine as well as public medicine. I confess I am a member of the VHI and pay my premium every year. If I must ever go to hospital, I have the choice of going to a private hospital. While I do not know whether this view accords with my party's policy, I believe the difficulty is not with public and private medicine but with mixing the two in the same hospital.

If people want to have private medical insurance, they are entitled to it and they should be allowed to go to private clinics. However, if people want public treatment, they should be allowed to access it. This is where the difficulty arises, in that every hospital has public and private beds. If one is fortunate enough to have private insurance, one can hop, skip and jump into one of the private beds ahead of people who may be more in need but who depend on the public system.

Why can we not have both? Why can we not have private hospitals for those paying VHI or other insurance? Public patients would then be able to access public beds because there would be no special beds in public hospitals and everyone would be treated the same.

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