Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick East, Labour)

-----of the children. There is no point in the Minister telling us what will happen in the future. She should tell us what will happen to the sick children now, to the children with scoliosis whose spinal curvature is increasing day by day because they are waiting for treatment. I shall read from an e-mail I received today:

What are these families to do? Watch their child every day to see if he is turning blue, having difficulty with his feeding, not let him out to play because he cannot keep up with other children as he doesn't have the energy to walk at times, don't mind run. They live on their nerves, are shattered, stressed and worried. These are just some of the difficulties that families of heart children have to deal with on a day to day basis.

That comes from parents of a child who had four heart operations in Crumlin hospital. Unfortunately, the child has since passed away but the parents are talking from experience.

I was one of those who tabled an Adjournment motion last week in the Dáil. For part of the motion, two speakers focused on particular children. The speaker on the Government side focused on a child called Jamie Murphy. I read in the newspaper today that a private benefactor has had to come along so that child can have her treatment outside this country. Where is the policy in a situation where a private benefactor must come along in order to pay for the essential treatment of a small child whose condition is constantly deteriorating, day by day? Discussing planning for the future is all very well. While I accept we must plan, we must deal with the current situation, namely, that our sick children are incurring greater costs than heretofore.

We must cut budgets, but to stand back and enact a 3% cut across all health services would be wrong. One must consider individual situations, particularly where children's health care is concerned. I fundamentally disagree with the Minister that the same type of decision making process can be applied to children's medicine as is applied to other aspects of the health service. This is a fundamental difference that we are trying to get across to the Minister, one that many of her backbenchers and members of the Fianna Fáil Party understand. I do not know whether Green Party Members understand it and the Minister no longer has a party, but there are Deputies on all sides of the House who realise one cannot stand back at a distance when it comes to children's health.

The Minister must intervene. Her problems must be overcome. One such problem was her abdication of responsibility for the majority of the health budget, despite her Department's advice. When the HSE was being established, she decided that its CEO would be the Accounting Officer for the sizable health services' budget. For this reason, she can stand back and say something is a matter for Professor Drumm or individual hospitals and that a percentage cut across the board is fine.

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