Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy has to acknowledge that in all of these matters of cardiac care and so on, the clinicians set the standards. This was agreed by most parties about 20-odd years ago, when there were political rows all over the place about where various services were to be located. The idea of national strategies in cancer and cardiovascular were developed, which have had the kind of huge impacts I outlined earlier in a response to another Deputy. Those would not have happened if we had not taken politics out of health, to a certain extent. I sense that we are now bringing politics back into the debate in terms of-----

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