Colm Keaveney (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle for this speaking time. I acknowledge the dedication, commitment and, above all, actions of Deputy Kelleher in proposing such a comprehensive motion on emergency departments.

Eventually, one gets used to the Government's style of counter-motions that are tabled week after week. Tonight's is a half-hearted, sly acknowledgement of a problem, yet it is riddled with self-congratulation and guff. These are followed by an attempt to shift responsibility for the problems created by this Government onto someone else before finally disassociating itself from direct responsibility for resolving the issues at hand. As a parliamentary technique, designing an amendment like this is grand, but it is difficult to see how citizens on the receiving end might see any solution to their problems.

The Minister for Health refers in his amendment to the addition of 149 public nursing home beds. What he fails to mention are the 7,000 residents of the 119 public nursing homes that failed to meet HIQA's physical environment requirements. I wonder how these older citizens and their families feel about the Government parties' approach to self-congratulation in its amendment. Only last week, the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, announced that, rather than bring HIQA's opinions to the Cabinet to ensure that sufficient funding was provided, she and the Minister, Deputy Varadkar, would solve the non-compliance problem by extending the deadline for compliance by six years. Pretend and extend, as it were. As a way of getting around failing to hit key performance indicator targets, this works from a political point of view but abjectly fails from the point of view of the thousands of citizens who languish on trolleys and in corridors in accident and emergency units. They and other vulnerable citizens have been told to take their place in the queue and that the Government has prioritised rewarding people on twice the average industrial wage with tax cuts. Those people must come first. The sick, the vulnerable and the senior citizens must wait.

This approach of shifting targets in order not to miss performance indicators is an admission of failure. It is an approach that the recent Ministers for Health, Deputy Leo Varadkar and, before him, Deputy James Reilly, have practised like an art form. What is the solution to failing to hit the average waiting times target? Double the target. The solution to failing to bring nursing homes up to HIQA standard is to extend the deadline.

After failing to address the accident and emergency crisis, however, the Minister changed his approach. In response to the recent case of a 91 year old man who was left on a hospital trolley for 29 hours, the Minister deployed his patented approach, that of the disinterested observer. He calmly and nonchalantly informed the nation that he was not surprised by what had occurred and that he expected more such instances to arise in the coming months. It was almost as if he believed that the deficiencies in the health service were an act of God, some kind of natural disaster, and that there was nothing to be done but shrug one's shoulders because we could expect these situations to happen.

While asserting that no one was to blame for the difficulties in accident and emergency departments around the country and carefully ignoring his own responsibilities as Minister for Health, he then opined that the health service would benefit from having sections of it privatised.

Here we get to what I believe lies at the heart of the matter. Fine Gael and, whether wittingly or unwittingly but as a patsy, the Labour Party have in health and in others areas of the public service engaged in a deliberate policy of degrading services and diminishing the expectations of the public, the members of which have a right to an acceptable service. Having stood over the degradation of public services, the Government uses the poor state of those services as an excuse to privatise them. Of course, they will be sold to the favoured few or perhaps the favoured one. I should not go any further with this line because someone is likely to make an accusation against the House in order to have the record redacted.

This Government has consistently failed to demonstrate the kind of urgent political will required to deal with the crisis in our health service. Instead, every year there has been a scramble for funds and an urgent requirement at the end of each year to address what is clearly a case of underfunding. The evidence of that is that there is no plan beyond the plan to fire-fight.

The question of whether there is political will in the Cabinet to face up to the future costs of the health service must be asked here tonight. Of late, the Minister's main rival for the leadership of Fine Gael seems more committed to buying F-15 fighter jets for the chaps in the Defence Forces than he is to funding public services. For some in Cabinet, the allure of NATO seems stronger than building the kind of state whose legacy we can celebrate in years to come. Before the current Minister took on the health portfolio, he successfully won plaudits and political capital for backing whistleblowers in An Garda Síochána. He did this against the interests and even the will of some of his Cabinet colleagues who sat with him at the table on the day. He rightly won praise, including from me, in the corridors of Leinster House generally and across the floor of this Chamber. However, his actions in the recent past contrast starkly with his silence in response to a HSE internal inquiry being launched against a whistleblower from within that organisation. I acknowledge the work of Dr. James Gray, who deserves the support of this House and the Minister. The Minister supported the Garda whistleblowers but he has refused to listen to those in both the health service and the mental health service. He and the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, have refused to listen to Deputies and to testimonies in the print media, in local media and on radio stations, including my local radio station, Galway Bay FM, a presenter on which, Keith Finnegan, deserves credit for his work in respect of waiting lists at University Hospital Galway. The Minister and Minister of State have not listened because they do not want to do so; they do not want to know the truth. To listen would mean they would have to face the consequences of the decisions they make within Cabinet in respect of the health portfolio.

During the recent debate on the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Bill 2015, I made what I believed to be a reasonable and uncontroversial statement:

The challenge for the next Dáil should not be primarily around a language of taxation and the economy. We do not live in an economy; we are citizens of a society. There must be a discussion about the fabric of our social structures.

I also said:

We need to start talking about delivering the social wage. We live in a society, not an economy. We can have the debate[s] side by side.

One can work with the other. Those comments are uncontroversial to me and I believe they apply to this debate. When responding to my comments, Deputy John Paul Phelan of Fine Gael, a Deputy for whom I have great respect, expressed something close to outrage and said the next general election should not be held on anything other than the economy, as if we do not have a society and as if the economy and society do not go side by side. For the Deputy, it is a question of the economy and the economy only. He said:

Fianna Fáil has learned nothing if it believes the primary debate in the next Dáil should not be about the economy and taxation. The economy should always be part of the primary discussion that takes place here and [elsewhere and across the constituencies].

In saying that, Deputy John Paul Phelan drew attention to the key difference between his policies and those of Fianna Fáil. He and Fine Gael believe that a government exists to serve the economy, while I believe a republic exists for the people and the good of society and that the economy ought to serve society rather than rule it. We are not a society of statistics. A statistical rise in GDP does not feed or clothe people. It does not respect the dignity of an elderly person in an accident and emergency unit, and it does not provide a disabled person with the dignity of his or her own citizenship within a republic. The solution requires political will and belief, and a value system should exist at Cabinet level.

Our accident and emergency units have become ground zero in the fight that must take place. As one of the highest-paid Ministers for health in Europe, Deputy Varadkar must roll up his sleeves and resolve the problem. We need to ensure a fairer society as we approach the next general election. Our communities require and expect that the most vulnerable people, some 350 of whom are to languish on trolleys in acute hospitals tonight, require this. What is occurring is completely unacceptable. It is not as if we did not know this set of circumstances was coming down the track like a train. The Minister knew and we were forewarned. Clearly, stronger political will is required. The Government does not have as part of the fabric of its politics the will to protect the most vulnerable.

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