Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

She presided over the PPARS fiasco. She was supposed to produce 200,000 additional medical cards and instead she has removed automatic entitlement to the medical card from pensioners. She decided to withdraw this vaccination. The Minister's big idea for providing hospital beds was to turn hospitals into businesses and have them provided by the private sector through co-location. In 2005 she said co-location would fast-track the provision of hospital beds. Three years later we have none of the co-located hospitals, no additional bed, not a single brick laid on brick. On Sunday night the Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy McGuinness let the cat out of the bag when he said there are some issues regarding funding from the banks and the provision of the co-located hospitals is in doubt.

The Taoiseach can solve the immunisation issue by making a political decision that would have agreement across the House, as Deputy Kenny has pointed out, and would relieve his backbenchers of the embarrassment and considerable personal difficulty of having to go up those steps and vote against it this evening.

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