Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

I am not going to go down that road other than to say the Minister, Deputy Harney, has my confidence. She has been a reforming Minister for Health and Children and has brought about more changes for the reform of the health sector than any of her predecessors. She has been absolutely committed to bringing forward quality assurance mechanisms in the system so that we have accountability and can deal with any issues that arise. The response of the Health Information and Quality Authority to the problems recently highlighted in respect of children in care was a result of the accountability mechanisms in place.

Having accountability mechanisms is not about presupposing that the system is and will be perfect in every instance and on every day of the week. In a modern health system hundreds of thousands of clinical decisions are made every year. Nowhere in the world is it suggested that such a system is error free. We must make sure that we identify where errors arise, that we mitigate the problem-----

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