David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)

On the issue of voluntary hospitals, as the Minister has raised it, I raised this issue with the CEO of the HSE, Bernard Gloster, when he appeared before the health committee last week, as well as with Derek Tierney, the assistant secretary in the Department of Health. I have seen media reports of attempts to make sure the voluntary hospitals play ball in relation to the integrated financial service management system.

This is something I raised with staff in the HSE when we were looking at the health regions. Muiris O'Connor and others were in briefings we got when the health regions were at that point - this was before they were established - on what they would do and what they would look like. The issue of voluntary hospitals came up and it came up again in the Oireachtas Committee on Health today. There is value in them, obviously. There is a value in those hospitals having boards. They value that themselves. They are very protective of and precious about it.

It is important for all of us, whether we are in government or in opposition, to make it very clear that there is a very high expectation from this House and from, I would imagine, the public who signs the cheques for those voluntary hospitals, that they provide all of the data asked for by the HSE. The HSE is the funder on behalf of the taxpayer. There have been incidents when it has not happened and if we want consistency across all hospitals we need every hospital, including voluntary ones, to play ball. From my perspective, it is important there is not any division between the Government and Opposition and that a very clear, unified message is sent to voluntary hospitals that there cannot be any excuse for not operating these systems in full.

I would expect voluntary hospitals to engage with all of those systems in the exact same way as any other HSE publicly-funded hospital.

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