Jerry Buttimer (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion and thank Deputy Ó Caoláin for tabling it. This motion should not be used as a political football. It is about the people, including the people Deputy Crowe spoke about this morning and hospital patients such as my father, and it also concerns the staff who work in hospitals. Those who use the word "crisis" should think about what they are actually saying and what they are doing about the health service. The health service is not just about our emergency departments or acute hospitals.

It behoves all of us at the beginning to congratulate and pay tribute to the men and women who work at the front line in primary care and hospital settings. There is no magic wand that can bring about gargantuan change of the kind some Members on the benches opposite speak about. To be fair to Deputy Ó Caoláin, he never said there was, unlike others in his party.

We are talking about having health services that are demand led and about people and how we treat and care for people. If it were a matter of investment alone, there would have been no problems in the time of the boom. We would have had hospitals in every corner and there would have been no need for any realignment of services. There would have been no need to worry about anything, but we just proved that is not the case. This morning, the Minister highlighted the "fantastic" legacy of Sinn Féin’s Minister in the north of our country. That just proves that Sinn Féin did not have the answers in the north of our country either.

Let us, therefore, examine the context to our objective. If any of us is ill or has a family member who is ill, our first port of call is the emergency department. It should not be. Primary care is critical to how we change the delivery of health services to all citizens. This requires collective and national buy-in. Deputy Mary Lou McDonald, Deputy Regina Doherty and I were members of the Constitutional Convention. Although the State is spending over €13 billion per annum on the health service, there are still issues affecting it, about which we are speaking in the Chamber today. Is it not time we stood back and had a Constitutional Convention-type approach to having a better model of delivery?

I work with Deputy Ó Caoláin on the health committee. He has produced his document, and the Minister has his document. I am sure Deputy Billy Kelleher will have some type of document also, although the Minister is correct in stating Fianna Fáil ran from the health service for ten years and left poor Mary Harney languishing there. I would not hold my breath in Fianna Fáil’s case. Why do we not have a national conversation, involving us all, in regard to how we change our health system? That demands that some with vested interests change their mindset regarding the health area.

Undoubtedly, we have policy initiatives and there has been an increase in funding. The Minister spoke this morning about the four-pronged approach. I agree with him completely that it is a question of capacity, moving people out of hospital into different settings, ensuring there is funding, and changes to work practices. All of this is happening.

Reference was made to recruitment. In the city of Cork, which I represent, Mr. Michael O’Flynn and his advocacy group have a proposal in regard to a new hospital. This is important because it is about the creation, in this case, of an elective hospital that would take the pressure off Cork University Hospital to ensure better delivery of health services.

It is important that community services operate in tandem with acute services. In Cork, there is a very strong community service and community intervention. The initiatives have worked. I commend the staff working in Cork because it is a question of ensuring people have access to health services in a timely and dignified manner.

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