Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Progressive Democrats)

Of course it is not the policy. The policy is to allocate long-stay beds to those who need them most. In fact, the policy is very much to keep people out of long-term care and to encourage people to stay at home with home-care packages and clinical support. From a zero base five years ago, we now have 11,000 such persons being supported at home. That is what older people want. If the Deputy would share the letter with me, I would like to pursue it.

In reply to Deputy Finian McGrath, the HSE is an enabler of providing services. It is not the panacea, or anything like it, nor could any organisation be. The purpose in having a unified organisation, and the reason so many people advocated it — all the parties in this House supported it although they had issues about the speed at which we implemented the legislation — and former Deputy Ivan Yates, in 1998, recommended it was because they believed it was a more appropriate way of providing better services. I believe it will provide better services. In particular, it will allow decisions around services to be made locally. At present, if one wants to make simple decisions, he or she must go into Professor Drumm's office.

That brings me to the issue of redundancy. With appropriate management structures right down the line, one will provide incentives to people to remain in an organisation where their talents are used appropriately, where they have got responsibility and where they can make key decisions. Nobody would want to stay in an organisation where they felt they had no real role except passing issues up the line, and that will be important.

It is too early to speak of redundancies. Clearly, there will be capacity to reduce the number of people who work for the Health Service Executive, not just in the corporate HSE headquarters where there are approximately 3,800 but in the health service generally. We must ensure, before we even embark on that, that we encourage the right people to stay. That is a human resource job. Other organisations can do it successfully and I believe we can too.

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