Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy's supplementary question takes us in a slightly different direction but I am very happy to engage on it. I always find this point quite bizarre because if Deputy Lahart had been the Minister for Health in 2011 and had gone into the Department of Health in Hawkins House, he would have needed good luck to find money to put into any initiative because of the state Fianna Fáil left the country in. I am honoured to be the Minister for Health at a time of expansionary budgets. The Deputy should remember that health budgets had to be cut during his party's last tenure and the beginning of my party's tenure. The NTPF was wound up but it was not as if the then Minister, Senator James Reilly, had lots of options for initiatives to fund.

He was left with extraordinarily difficult decisions. I am not afraid to embrace good ideas and I believe the NTPF is a good idea. It was not necessarily run in the best way in the past. It cherry-picked patients and allowed people who had not necessarily waited the longest to be seen. Therefore it did not prioritise the longest-waiting patients. It had a self-referral system that allowed a degree of cherry-picking and it did not do nearly enough insourcing. When it came to negotiating the confidence and supply agreement, the Deputy's party only looked for €15 million for it and today I am criticised for not putting more money into it even though we are allocating €75 million.

The NTPF has a role to play and I am very happy that it is playing a role. It is important that its role is also about insourcing and not just outsourcing, and that it targets those waiting longest. The Deputy's local hospital in Tallaght is beginning to see the benefit of that investment and I hope we will see more in 2019.

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