Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)

Something must be done about it. I wish both Ministers of State, Deputies McGuinness and Mansergh, well in their respective roles. I have no doubt they will discharge their duties to the best of their abilities. One of the duties they should focus on relates to the issue I have raised, which brings everybody and everything into disrepute.

Another issue that causes problems for people relates to the closing dates for different schemes, which are imposed by officials within the system. I have no difficulty with the imposition of closing dates for administrative purposes. However, I object when people whose applications arrive after the closing date are told that they cannot be considered this year and that they must go on the waiting list for the following year. There is no legislative provision for such penalties. Rather, these are internal provisions imposed for the convenience of officials. How dare they deprive an applicant of a higher education grant, for example, simply because some arbitrary closing date has passed? It is the job of these public servants to deliver the service in question to those who require it within the year to which the application refers. I could speak about this forever because the degree of public frustration in this regard is such that public representatives are all getting the blame.

There has been much debate on the establishment of proposed centres of excellence for the provision of cancer care services. When did it become the case that only certain hospitals could strive to attain that status? It was my understanding that all hospitals were obliged to be centres of excellence, with the same standards in all, rather than there being some with a higher standard than others. Deputy O'Dowd observed that the model being implemented in this country was scrapped long ago in the United Kingdom when it was found that it did not work. There were so many bottlenecks in the delivery of services that the model was entirely changed.

Somebody needs to take by the scruff the members of the think tanks who produce these ridiculous notions and tell them that before they offer any consultancy advice in future, they must set out where they got their information, who they consulted and took advice from and how much they are being paid to provide that advice. I have been putting down parliamentary questions on this issue since I first became a Member of the House and I am still awaiting answers to those questions. It would be of great benefit if something was done in this regard as a result of this report. Perhaps it is a job for one of the new and energetic Ministers of State. Civil servants and Ministers may not like it but it is important to get answers to these simple questions. All we seek are simple answers without long preambles and convoluted explanations.

I hope I have made some of the points that the Ceann Comhairle might have made. I have no doubt he is thinking along the same lines as me.

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