Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour) | Oireachtas source

They talk here about job creation when they destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs and did nothing to help those coming onto the dole queues. This Government has never made any attempt to hide from the Irish people the scale of our problems, and we have never been in any doubt that the stability we have achieved has required measures which have been difficult for many families. Nobody in this Government has ever wanted to make false claims about how difficult the road ahead might be, but now, at last, we can dare to hope. The economy is recovering, growth is returning and the numbers on the live register are falling. The prospects for the international economy are brighter. I do not claim that there will be no further setbacks or difficult days ahead of us, but we must also have hope.

In this budget, we are making a down-payment on the future. We are committed not just to rescuing the economy from the abyss but to building a better and fairer post-crisis Ireland. That is why we have begun in this budget to lay the foundations for a better health service. By introducing free GP care for children aged five and under, we are not just introducing an important reform in the health service but providing support to hard-pressed families. The Government is committed to providing free GP care because we can only reform the health service by ensuring that, wherever possible, care is provided in a primary setting. By starting now, we are setting down a clear marker for the future, and we are determined to achieve far-reaching reform of the health service, led by the Minister for Health, Deputy James Reilly, and the Ministers of State, Deputies Alex White and Kathleen Lynch. People will oppose this measure, quibble at it and complain about it. Interest groups will feel discomfited by it and try to undermine it. This measure is not just good health care policy; it is an important statement about the kind of Ireland we should want to build. I do not believe that any parent of a child living in 21st century Ireland should have to worry about the cost of bringing a child to the doctor. No mother or father of a young child should be faced with the dilemma of wondering how sick a child is and what must be gone without by the end of the week if €50 is paid to the doctor. That should not happen in a civilised society. Despite hard times, this Government is building a new national children’s hospital, but no child should end up in that hospital because the parents could not afford to take the child to the doctor in the first place.

In the same way, parents should not have to worry about how to find the money to pay for school books, and we have always believed that literacy is a right.

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