James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael)

I also support this amendment. The deeply worrying aspect of this Bill is that it misses such a great opportunity to do right in terms of completeness and my concerns, particularly around the fact that the Minister will be informed by the HSE which is something with which we all would agree and would want to see happen. I am concerned about the Stalinist-type censorship that the Minister can then operate. There is no onus on the Minister to make that information available to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children or on the floor of the House.

Furthermore, we could find ourselves in a rather outrageous situation where an independent group is asked to review a particular aspect of the service, the Minister will be the one to provide the information which will come to him or her from the HSE, but he or she can decide to only provide part of the information thereby rendering the investigation useless and pointless.

We need to include a line in the Bill, as my colleague, Deputy Shatter, has provided for, to ensure that there is political accountability. While we are short on time, the other point I would make is that there seems to be no sanction here for failure of the HSE to provide information and no reasonable time period given in which it must provide the information.

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