Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

When parents show up in Crumlin hospital with a sick child, they will not want to hear about service planning, budgetary discipline, the millions of euro allocated in this or that year or which Administration introduced what legislation. They will want to have their child attended to and cared for. If there are 100 fewer staff in the hospital, this will be less likely and it will be more likely they will be told to go away and wait. The job of the Taoiseach, Government and HSE, the body the Government set up to run the health service properly, is to have this problem fixed and the issues of service planning, budgetary planning and so on sorted out because patients, the people suffering at the receiving end of a health service that is not working, do not want to hear these excuses. They want to get better, be cured and secure the services they need in our hospitals. The problem is that the body the Government set up to run the health service is not doing its job efficiently.

Last week, the Labour Party published a set of proposals on the reforms required in the HSE to put right this problem, including a proposal to introduce a voluntary scheme to remove from the Health Service Executive the overlapping layers of management, administration and bureaucracy which appear to be getting in the way and eating budgets which should be used to provide the staff required at the front line to deliver the service in hospitals and health centres. We are long past the stage of arguing about budgetary discipline, service planning and all this gobbledegook——

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