Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Progressive Democrats)

It is €1.1 billion more than last year. To put it in perspective, since the organisation was established on 1 January 2005, its increased budget is more than €4 billion. That is more than we spent on the entire service in 1996. It is a huge resource. There are many challenges in that resource. Health is very labour intensive. There is a major debate about therapies and the recruitment of therapists. We have 112,000 people, full-time and whole-time equivalents, working in the system. It is a considerable resource. Last year we recruited almost 4,000 more people and this year more people will be recruited. Safety must be a priority and from now on, with the Health Information and Quality Authority setting standards and monitoring them, safety will drive the delivery of services. Practices that might have been justified in the past will not be the order in the future because it will not be safe to have them.

The allocation of these resources between hospitals must be a matter for the National Hospitals Office and Professor Drumm and his team. I have huge confidence in Professor Drumm's capacity to transform the health service. As he cannot be expected to do it on his own, he needs a good management team around him. We must ensure there are appropriate lines of accountability in the system. That is the job of the HSE board on foot of the findings of the Fitzgerald report.

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