Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I served as a member of the Committee on the Future of Healthcare over the course of the past year. I thank the Chair of the committee and the secretariat for their work. I agree that the Trinity team are worthy of special mention. In particular, I thank all the groups and individuals who engaged with the committee either in writing or by attending meetings. There were many of them.

There were 14 members of the Committee on the Future of Healthcare. I did not sign the final report. Mine was the sole dissenting voice and, in the course of my remarks, I will explain why.

However, I want to start by making some points about the positive proposals included in the report. There are three proposals I wish to single out and mention. The first is the proposal that there would be free general practitioner care for all by 2023. The idea is not that, five or six years down the road, this would simply appear. The idea is that it would be built towards 250,000 people gaining access to free general practitioner care year on year, starting with those without medical cards who are on the lowest incomes.

I would like to see a shorter timeframe but I am not going to make a huge point about that here. That is a very positive proposal which we will be supporting strongly.

The proposal to legislate for maximum waiting times of 12 weeks for inpatient procedures, ten weeks for outpatient appointments and ten days for diagnostic tests is very progressive and many in society will be watching carefully to see that it is implemented. The proposal to remove private health care from public hospitals by the year 2024 is significant and important. While I would like to see it happen more quickly, the important issue for today is that it happens. We will be watching that one very carefully.

I share Deputy Shortall's concern at the comments attributed to the Minister, Deputy Harris, in the newspapers the other day about implementing those sections of the report that are consistent with Government policy. It strikes me that it is counter to the idea of establishing such a committee in the first place and has the potential to gut the report of many of its positive recommendations.

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