Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am happy to speak on the Health Service Executive (Governance) Bill 2018, as it is aptly or ineptly titled. It should probably be renamed the "Moving the Deck-chairs on the Titanic Bill". The Bill provides for the establishment of a nine-person board for the HSE and that board will be accountable to the Minister for Health in the performance of its functions. That is certainly a novel idea. The introduction of accountability into the HSE is as novel a notion as one will get anywhere. I do not say that tongue in cheek; I mean it from the bottom of my heart. It is novel that a system that has been to the forefront in lack of public accountability and near total failure at senior management level is going to hold anyone to account. I wonder what we think will be achieved by means of this Bill. Apparently, it makes the new board accountable to the Minister for Health. Imagine that: the board will be accountable to the Minister. My God, that is a new one - someone in the HSE will be accountable. What an insult to the people's intelligence. Those who drafted this Bill and the Minister who oversaw it should have a bit of cop-on.

This Minister has presided over the greatest levels of health system dysfunction in the history of the State yet he remains in place. He is accountable to no one and only remains in his position because, in all likelihood, the Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, is more than happy to sacrifice him as a public scapegoat for the catastrophic failures of the HSE. The Taoiseach got his litany today in answer to the question of how all the bad things happened when he was Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Minister for Social Welfare and in respect of the national children's hospital. He knew nothing about the latter and did not want to know. I never heard such poppycock from a Taoiseach.

Let us see how accountable the Minister is and the HSE has been. There are record numbers of patients on trolleys and the Minister remains in his job. There are 498 people on trolleys today. A task force was set up eight years ago when there were 250 or so on trolleys. What did that achieve? Psychiatric nurses are at breaking point and are about to take to the streets but the Minister is still in his job and smiling. There is a €750 million overspend in respect of the national children's hospital - despite every warning being provided that this would happen - and the Minister is still in his job. He was warned that it the wrong site was designated. We had medical experts in here, people who had built hospitals in America and the UK, and he would not listen. It is the wrong location and will always be the wrong location. We cannot get nurses and in this case we cannot mind the nurses going to and from the hospital. People will not be able to park there and there will not be a helipad but the Minister is still smiling and in his job. The overspend is growing and the Taoiseach informed us earlier that we should continue to overspend because it is going to be a good project. Such logic baffles me.

There are chronic and unending waiting lists for children requiring assessment of needs, with no sign of the Government becoming accountable in that regard either. Children are waiting for orthodontic treatment and for scoliosis operations. My colleagues, Deputies Danny Healy-Rae and Michael Collins, are hoping that Brexit will not happen because they have booked buses - these are in addition to the 16 busloads they have already sent - to transport people to Belfast under the EU directive scheme in order to get cataracts removed and have knee and hip operations and many other procedures. The sad part is that we are paying for this out of our health budget in any event.

What little hope can we place in a Bill which merely seeks to create an alternative bureaucratic structure with a failing and sprawling organisation? The Bill seeks to make the new CEO accountable to the nine-member board. Was Mr. Tony O'Brien ever held accountable? No, he was not. Look at the cervical cancer scare. Were those who presided over the slow death of the health service ever held accountable? No, they were not. There was some accountability, as Deputy Kelly said, when we had the local health boards and locally elected politicians on them. What hope can we place in a Bill that is so very much like this Government, namely, all window-dressing and absolutely no substance? None whatsoever. I have no faith whatsoever in this legislation. It is both rubbish and ill-judged. We know that, no matter what happens, the Minister, even if he was to go out shooting people, would not resign. That is the chronic disrespect the Government has for this House and for the general public. It is a disgrace.

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