Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

I meant to answer that aspect. If there is a health service consisting of 140,000 employees, for example, the idea that operational responsibility for every action of the health service should be handled in the House by a Minister is not a sensible management model to adopt. We must be responsible for policy and where there are systems failures, the democratic mandate of every Member is to come to the House, highlight those issues and have them addressed.

Real accountability is not about trying to point out that we do not have a perfect system every day of the week, real accountability is about identifying mistakes and putting systems in place so it is less likely they will be repeated in future. The definition of accountability should take this into account, but too often it becomes an apportioning of blame game and, more important, the apportioning of the political blame game. This is when everybody knows that regardless of who the incumbent in an office is, they are not responsible for every operational failure in the health service any more than they are responsible for every operational success.

The overall policy structure and the principle of accountability should be as I have outlined. Then we can have a better debate, which would be far more collaborative and would bring about the prospect of improvements in the services on the ground, unlike the case currently when too often certain political opportunism takes over, whatever the issue involved.

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