Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Minister might produce the documentation I requested as regards the approval process for people.

The simple fact of the matter is that the Minister is still denying that in this process there is a governance process. There is the Government, there is the Minister, there is the board of the HSE and there is NPHET. A process was agreed as regards testing by the HSE through the Cabinet sub-committee. Then it went outside that process and was announced. That is essentially what these letters, in black and white for everyone to read, are saying. I agree with the Minister that the process has improved, but what I have just described should not happen. Surely the Minister would acknowledge that was an error and should not have happened in that way. It took an awful lot for a CEO and a chairperson to write letters like that to the Department.

I will run through my further questions. When will the Minister honour the pay agreements to all the nurses? I raised this with the Taoiseach.

How will the Minister proceed with Dealgan House? This is an extraordinary issue over which I have deep concerns and I have spoken to people about it. How will what happened there be investigated?

When will we have a date for screening? I will not hold the Minister to it. He knows how passionate I am about this whole area. When will we ensure we have dates because people are very worried about this?

When it comes to the whole plan for non-Covid health services, how will the Minister ensure that the remobilisation of our health services happens?

The biggest error in the roadmap published by the Taoiseach is that there was no roadmap for the health services. How is the pendulum swing between Covid deaths and non-Covid preventable deaths being measured? We are now in a Covid world, for want of a better phrase. People's behaviour has changed and so has the capacity of the health service. We need to move into another phase. How will we do so? How will the Minister manage issues such as the scheduling of appointments and distribution of resources? Stating that the facility in Citywest will be used to provide 1,300 new beds and University Hospital Limerick will be used in the manner proposed will not work. What is the Government's plan in that regard?

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