Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Róisín Shortall, teams from the HSE and the Department of Health and the Minister for Health, Deputy Reilly, agreed an objective set of criteria, internationally recognised, relating to urban and rural deprivation to be used in selecting primary care centres. They decided to select 20. However, behind the back of the Minister of State and parallel with all of this, the Minister seemed to have a different thought process entirely. After consulting Cabinet colleagues, he took a unilateral decision to add a further 15 to the 20, including two in his constituency. He published no criteria or provided no evidence base to justify this unilateral decision.

Public private partnerships have a significant commercial dimension. They involve general practitioners, allied health professionals, therapists and so forth. For this reason, above and beyond anything else, there must be objective criteria, fairness and transparency because various interests and consortia are entitled to bid and tender for such centres and projects. Is it appropriate that a Minister should ride roughshod over existing agreements and criteria and take decisions unilaterally which can benefit private sector interests? These are multi-million pound ventures with profit as a desired objective. There is nothing wrong with making a profit, but that is the key ingredient in this issue. It is equivalent to tendering, which is the reason Ministers should be at one remove from such decisions. Did the Minister know at the time of his decision who the preferred bidder for the Balbriggan site was? Was this disclosed?

The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Leo Varadkar, has described this as stroke politics. Others have described it as naked clientelism, but I am saying it is more than this. The commercial private sector dimension is significant, which is why the Minister is wrong in the decision he took. Does the Taoiseach agree that the Minister's actions were inappropriate and unacceptable?

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