Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to be able to speak on this matter. I compliment those who produced it but I did not need the "RTE Investigates" programme - none of us did - to know what is going on. The Minister has been in the job for long enough now to know what is going on. We have just celebrated the centenary of the 1916 Rising in 2016 and all that has happened in Ireland but what do we have? We have 632,185 people on waiting lists at the end of January. That is some legacy. That is some commemoration of the men who set up this country.

The HSE was set up by my colleagues to my right, the Fianna Fáil Party, of which I was a member at the time. I was told by the former Taoisigh Brian Cowen and Bertie Ahern, Senator James Reilly and others that it would be disbanded. It must be disbanded. It must be tackled and dispersed and go back to some sense of normality. It is cannibalising itself. There are many good people in the HSE - nurses, front-line staff, doctors and other people - doing great work but it is dysfunctional in the extreme. It must be got rid of. The Minister should not let HSE officials and their speak capture him.

The Minister has in his pocket a letter I gave him yesterday about a 51-month waiting list for urology. It relates to a blind man who does huge charity work and who is concerned for his life. It is scandalous and the list goes on. We have such cases all over the country. There is a €7 million overrun in an empty hospital in Tipperary. It renders the television programme "Yes Minister" insignificant. There will not be a single bed in this empty hospital. The Minister has visited it. He saw it and was shocked by the condition of it and how good a hospital it was. The system is dysfunctional. The children's hospital is going ahead in spite of the pleas from the sick children, some of whom we saw the other night on television, who cannot get to the hospital because of traffic. Helicopters cannot be landed there. We found out this week that its cost will overrun by €400 million or €500 million. Mr. Tony O'Brien has stated he has no money to build it but yet the Government continues with the fallacy and the scandal of going ahead with the site. The lunatics are running the asylum. Will the Minister please cancel the project first of all, build the hospital where it can be accessed, build it where patients can be treated and co-locate it with an adult hospital? It is a scandal he can stop. We will talk about this here in ten years' time. It will not be finished, it will be half built and it will not be accessible. We cannot get staff to go into it because they cannot get parking spaces. It is madness.

I have a contract, which the Minister has in his pocket too, with a private GP service that wishes to and can offer services. The Minister visited the place, for which I thank him. They got it after 12 months of negotiations. They were handed it last Friday evening. It is a two-week contract, that is, for 14 days. The people who drew up and issued that contract should be sacked on the spot. To put that much time into it - the Minister's time as well - and zero officials. The ink would not be dry on the contract papers before they had to close it again. This is what is going on.

I heard people here criticise the church. When the church ran the hospitals, when we had the matrons, the hospitals were clean and run properly. Now what do we have? We have a legacy of strikes, demands and more money and we have utter chaos, so I will not listen to anyone lecture the people who ran it. The hospitals were run-----

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