Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I pay tribute to Paul Maguire and his team on the "RTE Investigates" programme for an excellent programme last Monday night. It was a shocking and shaming programme but it was excellently done and represents the best in public sector broadcasting in exposing the major shortcomings in a public service that is so fundamental to people's lives.

The fact that as a society we are prepared to stand by while children in particular but adults also in significant numbers are left in agonising pain on waiting lists is a shocking reflection on our value system which needs to change urgently in respect of commitment to public services. Of course, the point that Deputy Catherine Martin made is central to this. The Government cannot have good quality public services and tax cuts. The idea of undertaking to abolish the universal social charge and give back €5 billion of tax funding at a time when our health service is in tatters, when we have a major housing crisis, utterly inadequate child care and so many of our public services are bereft of funding is nonsense. People cannot have it both ways. We need to be honest with the public and tell it that it is not possible to have tax cuts in the context of the shortcomings in our public services. That was very clear in last year's election. For the first time that I can remember in an election people on the doorsteps were saying sort out the health service, deal with the housing crisis and do not talk about tax cuts or €10 or €20 back a week when we have such glaring problems in our society. Government needs to take that message on board. We need to stop as a Parliament talking about the prospect of tax cuts because we cannot afford them for the foreseeable future until we get our services right. As long as our services are starved of funding we do not have a proper society. It inevitably leads to people living in the kind of shocking conditions that we saw last Monday night on that programme.

There are several areas where urgent action needs to be taken in respect of health. How is that waiting lists cannot be managed competently? We saw examples of several of the people referred to in the programme whose names had slipped off the list. We come across this constantly in our constituencies when people who thought they were on a nine month waiting list were not called for treatment and discovered they were not on the list. There is significant incompetence in the management of the waiting lists. Heads have to roll for that. If we cannot get basic administration of waiting lists that must be dealt with and somebody must be held accountable for that failure.

There are many other areas that need to be dealt with, the budget allocation is going into a black hole and is not tied to clear deliverable outputs and there is no measurement of activity. The fact that the HSE has a totally dysfunctional organisational structure did not happen by chance because if something cannot be measured it does not matter. We cannot measure activity, performance or output from the HSE because of the totally erratic and dysfunctional manner in which it is organised. We need to move away from the utterly dysfunctional two-tier system and introduce fundamental reform and a universal health system. I hope that when the all-party committee makes its recommendations, the entire Dáil will support them.

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