Seymour Crawford (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)

I thank Deputy Reilly for the opportunity he has given us to speak about the continuing serious failures in the health service. It is extremely difficult to listen to the Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Mary Harney, making totally unjustified claims regarding her improvements to the health service. This is at a time when there is still an average of 300 patients a day on trolleys, not including those who cannot get into hospital or were sent home early and, unfortunately, we in County Monaghan have plenty of experience of both.

If the Minister, Deputy Harney, had to sit beside a grieving widow and her family in Monaghan, as I did on Sunday last, and listen to a full history of their difficulties in dealing with their loved one's last few days on this earth, she might change her tune. Only last weekend a friend of mine whose son was critically injured in an accident in January 2008 and has been hospitalised until the last few weeks when he was moved to a nursing home under HSE care was told that she would have to pay for the cost of a carer to look after her son as he waited in the accident and emergency unit in Beaumont Hospital. The lady in question is on social welfare. Where is the love and compassion in a tragic situation like that?

The Minister did not have to deal with an 80 year old man who was in urgent need of eye treatment and had his eye appointment postponed for three months just a couple of days before his long-awaited appointment was due. How does she justify her great claims for cancer reform when people from counties such as Monaghan cannot get a bed in a Dublin hospital to get their necessary and possibly urgent operations carried out?

I ask the Minister to forgive me for saying this, but I believe if people die before they get into the system it does not seem to be a problem for the Health Service Executive or her as long as they can prove the statistics are right. It is extraordinary to read in the newspapers today of the retirement bash paid for by the Health Service Executive similar to the wanton waste of money which happened in FÁS when the Minister, Deputy Harney, was in charge in the Department responsible for that body. Does she not accept responsibility for anything or does she not have a conscience?

I draw attention to the situation with psychiatric care in County Monaghan where the Health Service Executive and the Minister are winding down the in-care services in St. Davnet's Hospital and moving them to the basement of Cavan hospital. This again is being done in the name of progress but it has serious implications for both patients and staff. On a daily basis I get telephone calls from individuals or their families where there are serious problems with depression. In the current difficult financial and economic situation there has been a major increase in suicides and the Minister and the Health Service Executive can no longer ignore the bloated, unnecessary administrative structure. She must ensure that front line services are retained on a 24-7 basis.

It is strange that Professor Drumm admitted that there was a total over-supply of administrative staff in the Health Service Executive but nothing was done about it in the years he was in charge.

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