Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will be sharing time with my colleague, Teachta Nolan. I thank the chair of the committee, Deputy Shortall, for driving the report. It cannot have been easy to achieve cross-party consensus on an issue as contentious as health. I would also like to acknowledge the work done by the secretariat - Ronan Murphy, Celeste O'Callaghan, Stephanie Bollard, Ronan McCabe, Denis McKenna, Claudia Zelli and Donal Smyth - and by the Trinity team for all the work and advice it gave us.

I am not sure they had an easy job but they made our job much easier with their assistance.

I am delighted this report has been published. I would have been even more delighted to hear a little more enthusiasm for it from the Minister. When he uses words such as "consider" and "reflect" in the context of the report that makes me think his approach may be to delay, postpone and have a think about its implementation.

It could be said that the Irish health service has been researched to death. We know what and where the problems are. We know we have a problem with capacity and yet we keep being told we must have a capacity review. The Minister does not need a capacity review to tell us there is a problem with capacity. He need only take a trip down to any of the accident and departments and have a chat with any person on a chair or a trolley and they will tell him, in no uncertain terms, that there is a capacity issue. He can see it for himself. The only way we will be able to address the capacity issue is by reopening the beds that were closed and by addressing the staffing shortages. To address those, as I have said on more than one occasion and the Minister will be aware of this, we need to create a workplace where our valued health professionals and health workers actually want to work. We need to say to them that we will create a decent workplace for them and that we want them to work in the Irish health service.

We in Sinn Féin want to see an Irish national health service where health care is available on the basis of need and not ability to pay. This report represents a very significant step in that direction. We in Sinn Féin are very pleased that we can see some, although not all, of our policies reflected in this report. It is a credit to members of the committee that we were able to put aside our political differences, in some instances, and consider good ideas, regardless of from where they came. Credit is due to the Chair of the committee in that regard.

When I was a young woman my father and I had a conversation about politics. I note the Ceann Comhairle is smiling. My father told me that everything we do is political. He said the water we drink is political and, indeed, it is in this country.

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