Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the Deputy's bona fides and we share a desire to fix this issue. I agree that the staff in our health service are incredible and are doing incredible work, and have done so over the past number of years with fewer colleagues standing beside them on the wards. That is now changing.

Since I became Minister for Health, we have increased the health budget not once but twice. We have put in place dedicated funding for waiting list initiatives. We are recruiting more staff. We are not cutting the health service budget.

I have to be honest with the Deputy. I have been in the job for nearly nine months. It is about how the money is spent. If we think that the answer is to believe that everybody needs to go to an acute hospital for every service, that we cannot do more in primary care and every time a new Minister for Health comes into office he or she should start changing the plan the health service will not work.

The health service needs a ten-year plan. That is why we have a cross-party committee, on which the Deputy's colleague, Deputy Barry, sits. It is due to report in April. That is why I am committed to working with the committee to implement the plan so we can collectively say to the citizens of this country that we have a roadmap for the health service, it will take ten years to get there, here are the milestones and here is how we will pay for it.

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