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

Over the four and a half years of its term, the Government has stumbled from crisis to crisis in terms of the fairly disastrous situation in the health service. It is a little like the story of Peter and the dyke, where one crisis appears and the Government moves under pressure to stick its finger in one hole and then, quickly, a crisis develops elsewhere. There have been multiple crises over the four years in accident and emergency departments, chronic rises in the waiting lists, the mess in child mental health services and cuts to all sorts of other services causing problems, whether it is home help or cuts to personal assistants for those with a disability.

Whatever it is, the fundamental problem is that the Government has not reversed the disastrous series of austerity cuts which have taken place since 2008 which have seen €4 billion taken out of the budget, 14,000 staff taken from the health system and 1,600 beds taken out of the system. The slogan of the Government was that it would get more for less. What we see now is one does not get more for less. When one slashes budgets, staffing and beds to that extent, one gets disaster.

Of course, the flip side of that coin is the Minister going on and, essentially, trying to scare people into taking out private health insurance in order to go over to the private system because of the disaster in the public system which, ultimately, is the real agenda of the Government. The Government's real agenda is to run down the public health system and cause a crisis in it through under-funding, under-staffing and under-resourcing in order to terrify people to move into private health. That is what has happened and it is really quite astonishing to have a Minister in charge of the public health system only a few months ago touting, essentially, for the private health insurance sector.

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