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

None of this would be happening were it not for the fact that the Government is committed to imposing unsustainable cuts on the health service under the troika agreement. Given that this is the decision made by the Government, it is vitally important that there is fairness, complete transparency and accountability when it comes to the allocation of scarce resources. What we discovered in the primary care scandal, for that is what it was, and now in the prioritisation and acceleration of projects in Wexford and Kilkenny is not fairness and transparency but political interference in order to shore up political bases. It is the cronyism and cute hoor politics which the Minister decried during the term of office of the last Government and which was a corrosive cancer in the body politic that helped to get the country into the mess it is in. The Minister is perpetuating that kind of politics by interfering in this way instead of decisions on the allocation of scarce resources being made purely on the basis of need and fairness.

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