Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The idea for a committee to look at a ten-year health plan did not come from the Minister but from an Teachta Róisín Shortall. Both Deputies O’Reilly and Buckley, on behalf of Sinn Féin, play a full part in that committee. The waiting list figures were kept away from that committee, however.

I asked the Taoiseach to consider the proposition for a single integrated hospital waiting list system. I even sent him a copy of our initiative again today. It is not an accident that our health service is in perpetual crisis. The fact is neither the Taoiseach’s Government nor its predecessor in Fianna Fáil are committed to a public health service. The Taoiseach is ideologically against that proposition. He does not believe citizens have an entitlement to a wraparound health service from the cradle to the grave as well as one to the highest possible standards.

Instead, the Taoiseach’s ideological position favours the two-tier system and the privatisation of those sectors which can make profit. Last month, the chief executive of the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, said the private sector is the most efficient and clinically effective way of having patients seen quickly. No one who saw last night’s television programme could call it efficient or clinically effective. From 9 January 2017, the NTPF claimed key targets for the HSE’s 2016 waiting list action plan had been achieved. That is the boast. That is the reason for the manipulated figures.

Will the Taoiseach take our proposition - some of us will raise it next week - and come back with a considered response to it?

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