Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I am delighted the Minister of State is present because, like myself, she has long-standing connections with Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown and she will be aware of the excellence of the staff, how hard they work and the service they provide to people in Dublin 15 and County Meath.

The hospital is being forced to wait again for at least three more years for vital diagnostic and imaging equipment, including an MRI scanner, because the HSE has taken a decision in principle to wait until after a proposed new private hospital is built and opened on the hospital grounds under the Minister for Health and Children's controversial private hospital co-location scheme. The preferred bidder for the private hospital is the Mount Carmel group and the HSE is considering its bid. However, the difficulty is the private group is insisting it should have the exclusive rights to imaging, particularly as it pertains to MRI scanners, in order that the public hospital cannot acquire such a facility. The public hospital will, therefore, have to pay for the services provided by the private hospital. Not only will the private hospital receive all the tax breaks and other lucrative incentives from Government, it will be provided with an income stream from the sale of services to the public hospital.

HSE management and its predecessors promised updated MRI scanning, imaging and radiological equipment for Blanchardstown hospital nine years ago. It was due to be installed at the conclusion of phase 1 of the new hospital building. It was then deferred to the beginning of phase 2, which is nearing completion, but now it has been long-fingered until the private hospital is built.

The Minister of State may enlighten the House as to whether the HSE has agreed to proceed with the private hospital. Once approval has been given, the private hospital will go to planning and tendering, be built and commissioned and finally opened, all of which will take three years. In the meantime, the thousands of patients in Connolly Hospital, many of whom come from the Minister of State's constituency in County Meath, will be ferried by ambulance or taxi and accompanied by ambulance and nursing staff to Beaumont Hospital, the Mater Hospital, the new private hospital in Hermitage or the Bon Secours to have necessary imaging undertaken. The cost to Connolly Hospital will outweigh the capital cost of buying and using a scanner and facilitating the hospital's teams by providing full diagnostic equipment. There is imaging equipment in relatively small hospitals in European countries that have not experienced the Celtic tiger, such as rural areas in France or the Czech Republic, and one would not be carted off in an ambulance or taxi with accompanying hospital staff to undergo diagnostics.

The situation in question is an extraordinary feature of life at Connolly Hospital and is inefficient and cruel to many of its patients. It is also costly. On ideological grounds, the Government appears to have decided that public patients at Connolly Hospital who have paid their taxes cannot have vital services because the private hospital wants a lucrative element of private medicine. Given the downgrading of Navan hospital in County Meath and the population on the western side of Dublin West, Dunboyne, Clonee and Navan, it is extraordinary that the Government should allow a blinkered ideology that seems to favour private medicine even though taxpayers, including those insured by VHI, pay for public medicine. It is also extraordinary that we in Blanchardstown and County Meath must wait a minimum of three years before people can access services locally. It is ideology gone mad and I hope that the Minister of State will tell the House that she may have been able to persuade her colleague, the Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Harney, to see some sense in respect of the Connolly Hospital situation and to provide the facility.

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