Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

We are here to discuss the question of extra funding. I do not think anyone in the country could dispute the need for extra funding for our health service. That is probably a general truth but it is particularly true at this moment. There are legitimate questions about where the money is going and conditions in our health service. If possible, I want to do back and forth question and answers.

I will start with an issue the Minister also raised when he was in opposition, only a number of days ago. On at least five occasions, he raised the question of the deal with the private hospitals. In his words, €115 million was a large sum of money, which obviously it is, and he was concerned that it did not represent value for money. Now that he is getting his feet under the table as a Minister, will he be any different from the previous Minister? Concretely, I repeatedly asked the previous Minister to publish a breakdown of those costs, and the cost estimates the Department or the HSE gets on a monthly basis from the private hospitals, so that we can see where that money is going and, in particular, why it is the case that we appear to be paying more than five times as much per bed compared to what looks like a similar deal with the NHS. Instead of providing this information, and I had many exchanges with the former Minister, he simply spoke at length about how important it was to use the private hospitals and about how we needed the capacity, about which there was no question whatsoever. It was a question of what the nature of the deal was and how to get that capacity. Will the Minister publish these details? Will he publish the breakdown of costs so people can see for themselves why it is costing so much?

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