Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Who holds the public health service together? It is the nurses and the midwives, the ambulance drivers, and the GPs. The Government will not speak to the INMO about the issues that have brought its members out on strike, it will not recognise the National Association of General Practitioners, NAGP, the representative group of the general practitioners, and it refused to talk to the National Ambulance Service Representative Association, NASRA, branch of the Psychiatric Nurses Association which is involved in an industrial dispute in the ambulance service. It will not speak to them. It will not give a cent to the people who hold the health service together but it will pay €1 billion over and above the original estimate announced by the then Minister, Deputy Reilly, at St. James's which was €485 million. It is now €1.4 billion under this Government's watch, and we will fork it out, and it will probably go higher.

According to a meme I saw recently, the tallest building in the world cost €1.7 billion, which is about the cost of the national children's hospital. It is shocking, but while the Government is willing to give money to these builders, it will not even talk to the people who hold the health service together, the nurses and midwives, GPs and ambulance drivers. It is shocking double standards, typical of Fine Gael. Its last little claim for credibility, that it could manage things in a prudent financial way, has now been exposed. It has made an absolute dog's dinner of this key infrastructural project and no apologising or explaining can justify it.

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