Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, spoke with Professor Keane over the phone because he is in Toronto. He has spoken on more than one occasion with Laura Magahy since her resignation took place. He has spoken and met with the implementation advisory council and will now consider its request for an extension of time. We will consider that in the context of the consideration of what we need to do to strengthen the governance arrangements in respect of Sláintecare implementation. We are determined to get this right, ensure the governance is as strong as it needs to be and any obstacles and roadblocks in the system are removed because they are not at a political level. That is the commitment of the Government. We are providing the resources. Why does Deputy Connolly think we do not want to implement Sláintecare? We do. The increase in the capacity of the system that we have provided lays a very solid foundation for those reforms. The lack of capacity has been the single biggest weakness in the system in recent decades and it had to be fixed first. We are now well on the way to fixing that and we will make further progress on it across 2022.

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