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

Certainly, that should be the case.

Deputy Murphy raised the issue of RTÉ and climate. RTÉ covers climate a lot. Maybe it does not cover it on “The Late Late Show” but it does so often on the website and on the news and in many programmes dealing with the issue. Coverage is generally by George Lee who covers it very well and passionately.

The issue of Ireland’s spend on healthcare was raised. It is the case that spending is now much higher than it used to be. When I was Minister for Health, which is not all that long ago, we spent approximately €14 billion or €15 billion on health. The figure is now €24 billion. A huge amount of money is now being spent on health. As the Deputy pointed out, broadly speaking on a per capitabasis – there are always different ways of measuring these things – our health spending is now one of the highest in the developed world. There are different reasons for that. We have very high pay levels. If we compare pay in the health service in Ireland with Northern Ireland, the UK or almost anywhere, other than the Middle East or Australia, it is clear we pay very well.

We have a high number of nurses, for example. We have more nurses per head and per bed than almost any other healthcare system in the world. We pay a lot for medicines as well, which is an issue. The fact we have quite old buildings and old structures adds to the cost. There are different healthcare rankings. It is not the only one and we are not 80th in all of them. We do very well on life expectancy and ours is one of the highest in the EU. We have much better cancer, stroke and heart attack survival rates than the NHS, which some people believe, for some reason, should be an example we follow. Our patient outcomes are generally much better than in that system. I do not know how much of the €24 billion goes to private contractors, be it for agency staff or the NTPF. I suspect it is less than 10%, so it is very high levels of public funding into our public health service.

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