Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

There will be three and a half minutes for Deputy Connolly and me and Deputy Wallace will take three minutes.

It was not necessary to view the RTE programme last week to be aware that we have an ongoing critical crisis in our health service. Every single public representative in the Dáil knows there is a crisis but the nation was shocked by the sheer, naked pain of the people and children on the lists. It really shocked the nation. The people who rely on our public services are paying the price for decades of underfunding, mismanagement, the role of vested interests and Government inaction.

I am a member of the Committee on the Future of Healthcare and sitting on that committee and reading the reports is an eye-opener. The dysfunctional nature of our health service is beyond belief. We do not have anything we can even remotely refer to as our health services. What we have is a jumble of public and private health care alongside a plethora of NGOs, charities, religious institutions and voluntary groups providing services that should be part of a national health service.

Health services of the sort developed in Ireland, as in other countries, as charitable institutions serving the poor. In the 18th and 19th centuries, unlike other countries in Europe, we never fully replaced these with a State health service. We just grafted on some State services. We did not have a Minister for Health until 1947, 25 years after the foundation of the State. A White Paper in the 1940s outlined plans for an NHS and a social welfare system following on from the Beveridge report in the UK. It was abandoned due to opposition from the Catholic Church, medical professions and the Department of Finance.

Until we face up to this legacy and confront the vested interests, whether they are religious bodies, elements of the medical profession, big pharma or others who provide health care for profit, we will continue with a dysfunctional health care system that is unfit for purpose. Patching up a broken system is very much a waste of time and money. We have seen that over the last period when we responded to crises by trying to put more money in and trying to deal with the issue. I find it very difficult politically to support the National Treatment Purchase Fund. We have a situation where private patients are using public beds and public patients are going into private hospitals either here or in England and Europe. It is just crazy and cannot go on.

As a Deputy in Dublin South-Central, I am often approached by parents from around the country regarding problems with the orthopaedic surgery at Crumlin children's hospital and especially waiting lists for scoliosis surgery. The longer children wait for treatment, the more serious the problem becomes, the more extensive is the surgery required and the higher the cost. It is quite incredible that a new and much-needed orthopaedic theatre was built in Crumlin in 2015 as a result of a massive campaign in the area. The former Minister, former Deputy James Reilly, was like a bee around honey on this campaign in 2009 and 2010. It was built in 2015 but has still not been opened due to a lack of necessary staff. It is absolutely crazy. I have submitted loads of parliamentary questions about this in recent years. I have been in contact with a young woman in Galway who has been on the orthopaedic list for scoliosis since June 2014. I contacted her yesterday again and asked if she was still on it and she is. I despair when I hear Fianna Fáil's mea culpaabout all this, saying it is terrible and they are all at fault.

We heard then that Crumlin hospital was to clear the backlog of children awaiting scoliosis surgery by February, which involved 70 operations. We had major problems then in 2009 and also in the more recent period.

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