Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Independent)

I would expect that when people come to the Deputy to leverage political support for challenges they face, at the least he would confront them with the challenges they can address. There was a litany of examples, especially in the west during the time of the Western Health Board, when year after year it ran over budget and the political system was leveraged to rescue the health board. That leverage no longer exists because the money does not exist to do that. All we expect every region to do is to live within the budget allocation given to it for 2010. No one is asking for a cutback in that budget, we are not having a supplementary budget and there is no emergency budget. We are asking that the budget allocated, the €15.3 billion we allocated to the public health service this year, which is 27% of Government spending, would be lived within in every region. Where that cannot happen, issues must be addressed, hospital by hospital or community care area by community care area.

The budget for the health service in the west, which was the focus of a number of contributions, is more than €2 billion this year. To put that in context, it is the amount we spent on the whole health service in Ireland in 1994-95, which is a considerable amount. Perhaps we could do with more money, and we would love to have more, but we do not have the luxury of having more given the financial challenges this country faces. That budget should be able to deliver for the west and its citizens what was planned in the service plan. I expect to see the plan's targets adhered to in the west during 2010 as much as I do for the entire country.

Regarding home help in the west specifically, 16,000 families will get home help services. Of course they could do with more and I wish we could have more, but we have maintained the budget for home help services this year. An extra €10 million went into home care packages and home help services in 2010, notwithstanding-----

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