Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour) | Oireachtas source

There were a variety of meetings held, including one involving the Taoiseach, me, the Minister for Health and the former Minister of State, Deputy Shortall. That took place prior to the summer and we put in place a working group representative of the Taoiseach and my office to address some of these issues and make progress on them.

The working group has been making progress since then. My priority and that of the Government, bearing in mind that we are dealing with this at a time when we have a very serious financial difficulty, is to achieve reform in our health system. At the centre of that reform is a shift to primary care. There is a very good reason we want to shift to primary care; it is because people who want to access our health system have to go to their GP, somewhere else to get a blood test and somewhere else to get another-----

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