Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail)

I thank my party colleague, health spokesman Deputy Billy Kelleher, for tabling this motion and for putting the very important issue of health on the agenda tonight so we can consider the health service and the challenges facing it for the rest of the year. People across the country and I want to see improvements to the health service. We want to see a reduction in waiting lists, hospitals operating effectively, health service reform and a system in which people without private health insurance can obtain a hospital appointment for a required service without being told they need to provide cash that they do not have.

There are undoubtedly health services that need to be improved. Unfortunately, since the Government took office, these issues have not been addressed. We have not seen the improvement promised by the Minister when he was on this side of the House, nor have we seen the improvement he proposed to the electorate. Instead, the Minister, who promised universal health insurance for all, has overseen in his first year in office a system in which more than 1,000 people per week give up private health insurance cover only to become dependent on the public system, thereby putting further pressure on the latter.

To ensure the money being invested in the health service is spent directly on the services being delivered, we need proper planning in the HSE itself. Unfortunately, this year's regional health service plans were proposed to the Minister only around the end of January. It was approximately in March that the national health service plan for this year was adopted. Therefore, the actual plan for 2012 was not adopted until approximately three months into the year. How can this ensure the money invested leads to the treatment and service desired?

In Donegal today, the local HSE announced that a bus service that has in recent years been bringing patients in the morning to Dublin for treatment in various hospitals is to be discontinued. I ask the Minister to look into this. The patients affected simply cannot hop on an express bus. In many cases, they are sick or have ailments of a kind that require the service in question. It reflects a lack of planning, in that the Minister has thrown the HSE a budget and told it to deal with the situation as best it can while giving little or no attention to the impact on services on the ground.

Will the Minister redouble his efforts and act on the rhetoric that we saw from him while he was in opposition? Will he show signs of making progress, that is, improvements in the health service rather than more confusion and a daily game of catch-up? I commend the motion to the House.

See this speech in context