Ulick Burke (Fine Gael)

Will the Leader ask the Minister for Health and Children to come to the House as a matter of urgency? I support Senator Tuffy's earlier comments. It is difficult to understand our complacency when a conference held by the Combat Poverty Agency and the Department of Health and Children in Dublin yesterday was told that 6,000 people died prematurely last year primarily because they could not access basic health services. It is an indication to all that the strategy of the Minister for Health and Children has failed at the most basic level of access to primary care. If those people had access to medical cards, many of them would not have died. It is of the utmost importance that the Minister should come to the House to declare once and for all that the health strategy has failed and to say that he will put in place an emergency response group to provide medical cards to people who are caught in a poverty trap.

Will the Leader ask the Minister for Agriculture and Food to intervene in the current clerical dispute involving officers of the Department of Agriculture and Food in Limerick, Galway and Mayo? Yesterday, the Minister was directed by a court to release identity cards for animals to allow them to be sold. It is a measure of the hardship being experience that a person has to resort to the courts before he can sell his livestock. If this continues while the Minister for Agriculture and Food stands idly by, it means there is a crisis in agriculture regarding which no one is prepared to take action. It is important to request once more that the Minister do something.