Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

The Taoiseach makes it sound as though the consultants are out there organising queues, one line for urgent cases and another line for non-urgent cases. The reason cases are designated as urgent is because there is an 18-month queue and consultants must do something with people they have concluded are ill. If the Taoiseach or I went to the doctor and he recommended we get a colonoscopy, we would not wait 18 months to get it done. I do not see why the Taoiseach and his Government should expect people who do not have the money to pay for the service to wait for it either. Just because somebody is not sufficiently well-off to be able to go to a private facility and pay for a test or to have the level of insurance that will provide that test quickly does not mean they should be put at greater risk of dying, which is what is happening.

The Taoiseach has not been able to tell me of any country in Europe with a longer waiting list than Ireland for these tests. He is, and has been, the first out of the traps to claim credit for everything good that has happened here for the past ten or eleven years, but he refuses to take responsibility for what is going wrong. He specifically refuses to take responsibility for what is happening in the health service. Every time he is asked a question about it, he finds a consultant, doctor or administrator somewhere whom he asks to carry the can.

Susie Long was very clear about who was responsible when she told Joe Duffy that she blamed the Government. Frankly, so do I. I ask the Taoiseach again to explain the e-mails that have been passing between his Government press secretary and his predecessor about covering up what happened in Cork. That is what this is about.

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