Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The emergency plan put in place and co-chaired by the secretary general of the INMO is now beginning to pay real dividends. I hope we can continue in that regard. Of course, everybody understands the pressures under which front-line staff work. I hope the State's negotiation machinery can be used to sit down and discuss rationally what is happening, including the extra allocation of resources, personnel and facilities and other good things happening in the health service, and I hope we can alleviate the burden on so many people in a way we were not able to do in the past. Deputy Martin should remember the financial abyss he left the country in when he ran out of the Department of Health and when he sat at the Cabinet table in the lead-in to the change of Government in 2011, when we did not have a red penny, as one of his own party members said, to build a hospital in Dundalk.

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