Brendan Ryan (Labour)

He was referring to a situation where money is scarce. I do not accept that it is. The Government is constrained by ideology from using the funding at its disposal because it will not act in a sensible manner. That would require it to prioritise and borrow sensibly and intelligently for capital projects that are economic while using current resources to fund current problems, among them the inadequacies in the BreastCheck service.

This is a rich country and it is not short of resources; it is short of the political will to make choices and those that are made are conservative and backward looking. The greatest of all economists, John Maynard Keynes, observed that whenever he heard prominent people talk about life in simple terms, such as stating that money was short, they were inevitably harking back to some out of date economist. This is not the 1980s and Ireland is not a poor country. The question is one of choice.

The Government made choices about utilising our resources and one such choice was to slow down the implementation of the BreastCheck programme. The Minister outlined all the issues that needed to be addressed concerning the rollout of the programme. He is superb at that kind of presentation. However, he failed to tell us that when the decision was taken to extend the programme to three counties, those in BreastCheck, as the informed the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children last week, were the last to be informed. The Minister engaged in his usual nonsense of making a small gesture. The fundamental problem is that it will cost money to extend the BreastCheck programme. The Minister has failed to get the Government's sanction and he has dressed up this failure in a cloud of pseudo-scientific argument which is nonsense.

Amendment put.