Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

As with so many issues before the election, Fine Gael and the Labour Party were full of fine words, noble sentiments and not a few specific promises when it came to the protection of our health services, accident and emergency services and hospitals in general. The Fine Gael pre-election document spoke about having the most ambitious plan for the health service since the establishment of the State. Fine Gael was going to increase access and make the system much fairer, dismantle the dysfunctional HSE, created by Deputy Micheál Martin, and end the efforts of Fianna Fáil and the former Minister and Deputy, Mary Harney, to privatise the health system by favouring private over public care. With regard to accident and emergency services, the document stated boldly that no accident and emergency services would be withdrawn unless a demonstrably better service was put in place and was seen to work. It also talked about addressing the manpower crisis within the health service and said that Fine Gael would initiate a long-term manpower strategy to tackle the chronic front-line staff shortages.

Not only have all those fine words and noble sentiments been dissolved and the promises broken, but what the party is doing is exactly the opposite. The ambitious plan for reform is now beginning to look like a very ambitious plan to massacre the public health services, slash the number of beds and front-line health services and to prepare the health system for full-scale privatisation. The evidence can be seen everywhere.

There are people from Skibbereen and Bantry in west Cork in the Visitors Gallery tonight. Throughout the country, people are out on the streets protesting against plans to cut the number of hospital beds, cut budgets and downgrade accident and emergency services that are reeling under the impact of the recruitment embargo which is slaughtering the number of front-line health workers who are able to deliver the services. In west Cork, Donegal, Roscommon, Nenagh, Ennis, Blanchardstown, Loughlinstown, Dundalk, Drogheda and any area one cares to name the services are being slashed.

The figures in that regard are quite shocking. The number of people on trolleys is worse than ever. A total of 344 people were on trolleys today. In Cork University Hospital there were 23 people on trolleys, in Beaumont Hospital it was 37, last Friday in Galway University Hospital it was also 37, in Drogheda today it was 30, in Wexford it was 22 and in St. Vincent's Hospital it was 24. In fact, in the case of St. Vincent's Hospital that figure was low compared with the figure on some days last week. On five consecutive days two weeks ago St. Vincent's Hospital had to go off call for two hours because it simply could not cope. That is the reality. A total of 2,317 beds have been closed, 1,000 nurses have gone from the health system since 2008 and 6,000 other health workers, mainly front line, have also gone. Furthermore, according to the HSE, another 7,000 health workers will be gone by 2014. That is the reality of what the Government is doing to the health service. According to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, the number of people on trolleys in the past year has increased by 33%, but the Minister still persists with the attacks, downgradings and cuts in the health service.

All of this is covered and justified with spin and, frankly, lies about reconfiguring services, health and safety issues and, the one I like best, centres of excellence. The Government is busy creating centres of excellence. The truth is, as the Minister, Deputy Varadkar, predicted when he just a humble Deputy, the centres of excellence are war zones. They are like scenes from horror movies except that, unlike the movies, they are real. Accident and emergency departments are overrun, overwhelmed and unable to cope. The Minister is trying to tell us that downgrading or closing accident and emergency services in Roscommon will not make the situation worse in Galway, that doing so in Nenagh and Ennis will not make the situation worse in Limerick, that doing so in west Cork will not make the situation in the bigger hospitals in Cork city much worse or that closing Loughlinstown hospital will not worsen the already overwhelmed situation in St. Vincent's Hospital. It just does not add up. If one cuts budgets and the number of front-line workers, closes down beds and downgrades services, it is obvious that one will not get centres of excellence but disaster zones which simply cannot cope with the volume of cases coming to them. That is the reality of the so-called fair care policy.

What is really going on behind the spin and the pre-election noble sentiments and promises? We got some indication from the revelation that the Minister is considering bringing in outside private contractors to manage some of our hospitals. That gives the game away. When one wishes to run down a health service or public amenity, the oldest trick in the book is to starve it of resources, claim there are health and safety issues and cause a crisis in that service to terrify people into moving to private providers. This also justifies a more general privatisation onslaught on the health care system. In this manner the Minister can open health care to the same type of privateers and corporate vultures who have wrecked our financial system and who, through speculation and gambling in the financial sector, have crashed our economy. He wishes to hand over our vital health services to those types of people.

This is all linked to the EU-IMF austerity programme. We all know, and no sane person disputes it, that it was greed for profit and the unregulated privatised nature of the financial system that led to the economic catastrophe that is now gripping Europe, yet the EU-IMF demanded privatisation in Greece, Ireland and Italy in these so-called bailout packages. That is what they want. Standing behind them are the general agreement on trades in services and the round table of industrialists in Europe who see services such as health and education as previously protected areas that they can prise open and get their greedy, profit-hungry hands on vital services that people need and from which they can make money. The Government is collaborating with them in destroying our public health services in order to open the door to these corporate vultures who are being assisted by the troika, the EU-IMF-ECB, in demanding austerity cuts and privatisation of our vital services.

I hope the big protests that are beginning to take place in Bantry, have taken place in Roscommon and are planned for Loughlinstown this weekend, and which we saw in Limerick in recent weeks, will link together into a national movement that will resist these vicious, unjustified, brutal, unfair assault that is going on in our public health services and force the Government to reprioritise people and the most needy over bailing out bankers and opening things up for corporate vultures.

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