Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour) | Oireachtas source

To come into this House and cry crocodile tears for older people and people with disabilities when it is was they and they alone who put a catastrophic hole in the national finances is a cynical move indeed.

The adjustments to the budget in the health service over the past number of years have been difficult. Since 2010, €1.75 billion has been removed from the health budget and services are being delivered with 6,000 fewer staff. Yet, this Government and its Minister for Health, Deputy Reilly, have demonstrated that it is still possible to make progress, in some cases more progress than was made by the previous Government during the largest expansion on health spending in the history of the State. Let us take the number of people waiting for care on hospital trolleys. Last January 12 months, Fianna Fáil presided over an all-time high of 569 patients on trolleys. This September that figure had decreased by 75%. Surgical waiting list numbers are down 7% and the number of people waiting 12 months or more is down 85%. This was not achieved by accident but by design, by the putting in place of a new special delivery unit tasked with changing how hospitals manage their patient flows.

This Government and its Minister for Health has not shied away from tackling vested interests in the health service, including addressing the cost of drugs, increasing competition between general practitioners and only last week striking a deal to get more flexibility from hospital consultants and reducing pay for new recruits.

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