Brendan Griffin (Kerry, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The people of this country send us to the national Parliament to raise concerns and highlight the issues that affect them in their daily lives. I ask the Minister to end the practice of referring health questions to the HSE for response. While I accept that the HSE might need to be consulted, I emphasise that parliamentary accountability in respect of the health service needs to be returned to this Parliament. I do not think it has been here since Mary Harney was Minister, or perhaps before that. The Department of Health needs to act as a Government Department by giving Members of this Parliament answers on health issues that affect the people who elected us to represent them. It is not good enough that this is not happening at present. There needs to be a change in this regard.

I would like to make a point about elected members of local authorities. I was a member of the regional health forum in the southern area, which is, in effect, a body that provides expensive responses to written Dáil questions. The answers we ultimately get from the forum are the same as the answers we get to parliamentary questions, except that it costs a great deal of money to hold meetings of the forum. We do not get an opportunity to scrutinise or ask questions at the forum. Anyone who attempts to do so is seen as some sort of pariah or pain in the arse. That is just not good enough. The people deserve far better than that. It needs to change.

There are certain things that can be done now and other things that will take a longer period of time. I welcome the move towards an all-party approach to the future of health care. Some people laughed at me when I said on the public record in advance of last year's general election that this was needed. Some people said it would never happen, but thanks be to God it is happening. It is long overdue. We should put aside party differences, where possible. We need to focus on the national interest when lives are at stake. Even though we have all known for a long time that what we saw on the television on Monday night has been happening, it is simply not good enough that it is continuing to happen in this day and age.

This is not about expenditure. Thankfully, we are now in a position to spend more money. That is a good sign. It is a sign that the Government and the people have got things right in recent years. We have not got things right in health. We need to admit that we have got things terribly wrong in health. If we want to move forward with the confidence of the people, we need to acknowledge where we have made mistakes. We have got things right on the economy, but we have got things horribly wrong with regard to hospital waiting lists. There is too much duplication of services. We do not have economies of scale throughout the health service. That is not a popular thing to say in here. Most people will never say it in here because they are afraid they will lose X, Y or Z from their own neck of the woods.

We need to be realistic and put in place a system that is responsive. Anything would be better than the system that is there now, which is simply not working. We need to go through the rank and file of people in the Health Service Executive, HSE, and the Department of Health to see who is surplus to requirements as I fear many of them are. I am not talking about those on the front lines but further up in the management positions, as far too many people are surplus to requirements, delivering very little but being paid a lot.

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