Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Clearly, children need this hospital built. We all need and want to see it built. We want to see it open and delivering the necessary services. It is just not good enough, however, for Deputy Donohoe, as Minister for public expenditure, or for the health Minister to simply say what the board is doing and not to reassure people what the Government is doing to ensure an outcome here. I think what is frustrating people is the lack of outcome, the lack of accountability and the constant impression of passing the buck and blaming others for cost overruns and delays.

There is here a pattern. The health Minister is the Government line Minister who is politically responsible and accountable for the spend in health, but every time another health scandal or cost overrun hits the headlines, the health Minister is nowhere to be seen. When the cost-saving recruitment embargo transformed into a suppression strategy, whereby 2,000 vacant posts are being quietly abolished, the health Minister was nowhere to be seen. When that embargo was debated earlier this year, it was more often than not the former Taoiseach who went out to bat for it. The annual health budget has become a joke; it is such a fiction. Yet every day we see hundreds of people still on trolleys waiting for beds, childhoods spent on waiting lists, crowded accident and emergency departments and appalling tragedies like the awful death of Aoife Johnston.

It is not good enough to say what the board is doing; what we want to hear is what the Government is doing to ensure this hospital will open.

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