James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael)

I want Deputy White and her Green Party to look at this issue tonight. I want them and their colleagues in Fianna Fáil to realise what their vote would mean to families, to patients such as Dakota Rudd and Carol Ann Walsh and to Conor Coughlan, who is in the Visitors Gallery tonight. I welcome him and his mum and dad, Con and Mary. I salute his courage. I can look these people in the eye. I hope the Minister of State will be able to do so after tonight. The Taoiseach's words today gave no consolation to these children and their families.

The reason I entered politics was because of health. Nothing is more political than health and I do not buy the buck that we are politicising health. It is political everywhere one goes. Co-location of our hospitals is political. Having no cancer centre north of a line between Galway and Dublin is political. The failure to address reform in the HSE is political. In fact, it is political cowardice, the worst kind of which is attacking the weakest in society. Removing special classes from learning disabled children and medical cards from the elderly, meanly means testing the terminally ill, making them queue-----

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