Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 1:

In page 5, between lines 8 and 9, to insert the following:"(3) Before specifying priorities or performance targets under this section the Minister shall consult with the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children.".

Amendment No. 1 is good to go; it was amendment No. a1 to which the Minister of State referred. I have every confidence she will adopt amendments Nos. 1 and 21.

We are proposing this amendment in order to enhance accountability and the role of Oireachtas Members. Having been a Member of this House for 16 years, I believe this is something that needs to be achieved, particularly with regard to the committee system and to that committee on which I currently serve, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children.

The executive is being abolished and the proposition in the Bill is that more power and responsibility be vested in the Minister. I will refrain from blessing myself at this point but that is something that I might have been tempted to do. There needs to be a balance and there also needs to be openness and transparency. The explanatory memorandum to the Bill, which I appear to have left behind me, states that it is essential that the HSE be properly accountable to the Minister for its performance, and I agree with that. My question, as I highlighted on Second Stage, is this: what about the accountability of the Minister for Health to the Oireachtas, in the first instance, and to the people of this State?

The engagements we have not only in this Chamber but on a quarterly basis at the health committee and during Dáil questions - including recent occasions on which Deputy Kelleher and I both strongly objected when, as Opposition voices, we were seriously curtailed in the opportunity to perform our role of holding this Minister to account - are all after the fact. Policies, priorities and performance targets are already set and, as we have discovered only in the recent past, these performance reports by the HSE have been somewhat dickied up in order to present a more favourable picture of performance on the part of the HSE and the services over which it is responsible, as exposed earlier this year in correspondence between the offices of the Secretary General and the director designate of the HSE. We are playing catch-up as elected Members in terms of actual performance and trying to see behind the PR smoke-screen that is often put up by the Department and the HSE, of which we have had ample experience. With respect to the Minister of State, Deputy Lynch, she noted all of that when she was an Opposition voice in this Chamber over many years, and, sadly, the situation has not changed one iota since this Government took up office and the Minister, Deputy Reilly, took the helm of the health services.

The health committee should have a direct input. It should be consulted. The members of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children, as it is designated, work very well together in an earnest effort to address issues collegially and in the interest of the wider public whom we are elected to serve, and, as best as we can, we leave our respective political differences aside in seeking to address matters in the most serious and effective way.

Amendment No. 1 contains a very simple formula and its purpose is as I have described - to provide that "[b]efore specifying priorities or performance targets under this section the Minister shall consult with the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children". It is simple but appropriate, and worthy of the Minister of State's support. I commend the amendment to the Minister of State.

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