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

I thank the Taoiseach for his reply. The frequency with which the Cabinet committee on health meets is instructive in itself. For three and a half years, every time the Taoiseach was asked a question in this Chamber about the health service, he replied that everything was going fine and getting better. Waiting lists were disappearing, treatment was getting better and reforms were on the way that would cure all our problems. The work of the Cabinet committee on health, we were told, was all about the health reform programme. In the midst of all this, we had the Taoiseach's consistent denial of there being any attempt to take medical cards away from families. Eventually, after months and months of our pursuing that issue, he had to change tack, admit he had made a fundamental error and reinstate discretionary medical cards to many needy families across the country. We now have new evidence that waiting lists have been falsified. Not only was the budget last year falsified, but we discover the waiting lists were rigged to give a better picture. This all happened since the then Minister, Deputy James Reilly, abolished the independent HSE board without putting anything in its place, which was a big mistake.

The Taoiseach indicated that the next meeting of the Cabinet committee on health, chaired by him, will be in early November. The Minister, Deputy Leo Varadkar, and his officials are saying that the health reform proposals initiated under the previous Minister are not workable or implementable and will be pushed out to 2023 or some other date in the next decade. That shows some amount of arrogance. Do we need more frequent meetings of the Cabinet health committee to get a grip on the situation? One has to wonder what that committee has been doing for the past three and a half years. The Taoiseach chaired the meetings at which the publication of the White Paper and the reform documents were approved.

Now all that spin has been exposed as empty rhetoric as opposed to having any substance because the Minister and others have said this cannot be implemented and the reforms are not workable. Does the Taoiseach need more meetings of the Cabinet sub-committee to get a grip on health?

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