Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

Almost three years ago, the Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Harney, announced plans to hand over sites of public hospitals for the building of super-private clinics. She argued at the time that there were two reasons for this decision. First, she said if she provided 1,000 private beds in the hospital system a similar number of public beds would be freed up. Second, she said that doing it this way would fast-track the provision of hospital beds. We are now three years into the fast-track and none of those beds has yet materialised. The Taoiseach knows there is much opposition to this strategy among medical professionals. Several medical people have expressed the same view as the Labour Party about this strategy, that it is effectively creating one hospital system for people who are well-off and a different system for the poor, for those who are not well-off.

This time last year we were in the middle of the general election campaign and it is clear that a majority of the people who ended up being elected to this House were people who opposed that strategy, including some of the people on the Taoiseach's side of the House. I remember Deputy Mary O'Rourke opposing it and I remember the Minister for Foreign Affairs opposing the private clinic in his constituency.

I have a couple of questions for the Taoiseach about this plan. First, is he still proceeding with the plan? Is the Government proceeding with what has been called the co-location plan? Second, will the Taoiseach today give the House a list of the hospitals that will be built under this plan? Third, will the Taoiseach tell the House when they will be built? Fourth, will he tell the House what will be the total cost of this plan to the public purse, both in terms of the tax reliefs that are being provided to the private developers who are to build these hospitals and the loss to the public hospital system of the income which the public hospital system would have received from insured patients?

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