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

Yesterday the Minister took offence at the fact that we used words such as "massacre" to describe the cuts in the health service and "war zone" to describe the situation in our accident and emergency departments. He accused us of hyperbole. What else can one call removing 2,300 beds from the hospital service, and 5,000 over a longer period, aside from a massacre of bed numbers? What else can one call taking 1,000 nurses from the health system in two years, along with 5,000 other health staff, most of them front-line staff? What else can one call, aside from a nightmare, the fact that 429 people are on trolleys today? That is a war zone for patients and staff alike. What else can one call €1 billion being taken from the budget but a slashing and a massacre of the health budget?

Although the Minister is a doctor and I am not, one need not be an expert to understand that a health service is made up of ambulances, beds, nurses, doctors, hospitals, machinery and, dare I say, money. If one cuts those, one does not get a better health service but a worse one. If one slashes those things in the manner we have seen over the last number of years and if one intends to continue with an IMF-EU programme that insists on further cuts to those budgets and staff numbers, things will not get better, regardless of what words one uses to describe it. Reconfiguration, reform and all the other slogans mean nothing. The nightmare gets worse and the numbers on trolleys increase.

The evidence is clear from Roscommon. What the people of Roscommon feared has happened. The situation has got worse for them and it has got worse in Galway, where the overflow has gone. That is what will happen if Bantry, Youghal, Mallow or Victoria South Infirmary are downgraded to the remaining hospitals in Cork. In my constituency, Loughlinstown hospital has 21,000 accident and emergency cases per year. If it overflows into St. Vincent's Hospital, where there are 20 or 30 people on trolleys every day and where the hospital had to go off call for several days last week, will the situation get better or worse? One need not be an expert to work that out. Our motion is asking the Minister not to make things worse.

The link between the downgrading and the cuts and the real agenda of privatisation in the health service is clear in my constituency. Loughlinstown hospital is to be downgraded and the overflow is to go to St. Vincent's Hospital, which cannot cope. However, the Beacon Hospital, a private hospital, has opened in Sandyford and the Blackrock Clinic is advertising on the radio, urging people to come to the clinic. That is not movement towards a single tier system, but the stealth privatisation of the system. The public system is run down, people become fearful and anxious about a system that cannot cope so they are forced to go to the private health care providers. That is what money following the patient means. Money following the patient means the patient walks out of the public health system that cannot cope and into a private hospital out of fear. Money should go before the patient, so the bed, doctor, nurse, machinery, ambulance and resources are in place. That is where the money should go; that is the relationship between the two.

I do not have time to discuss the Dutch model other than to point out that a majority of Dutch people think health services have got worse since the introduction of universal health insurance.

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