Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am a little disappointed that the Deputy has chosen to try to make this issue, which is very sensitive, into a party political one and to try to personalise it politically. I would remind him that while he may pretend to claim otherwise, Sinn Féin is very much an establishment party. In the past 20 years, his party has been in government on this island as long as my party has been. His party has co-chaired a government that is in charge of health services in Northern Ireland which consistently perform inferiorly to our health services here in terms of patient outcomes. If Deputy Doherty is holding me responsible for any clinical failures in the past ten or 20 years here in this State, then surely his party is responsible for the failures that have occurred at a clinical level north of the Border. Sinn Féin cannot have one standard for us but no standards for itself.

In relation to capacity issues, it is accepted that we have capacity constraints, not just in our mental health services but in our health services generally. Huge investment has gone into our health services in the last couple of years. The Deputy may not be aware of this but we have 40% more doctors in the health service in Ireland now than we had ten years ago, including 40% more consultants. We have more nurses and midwives than ever before, at 40,000, with more per head and more per bed than almost any country in the world.

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