Ann Ormonde (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Seán Power, and wish the new Department team well with the important task ahead. Listening to the previous speaker one would wonder whether the Labour Party is the panacea for reform. She seems to have concluded that the Labour Party is exclusively right and that everything it suggests should be done and that our thinking processes do not function in the manner in which we go about business. I could hardly believe she had such a list of negative comments. However, I will try to turn matters around and put something positive into this debate, rather than have the one way traffic I have listened to over the past five or ten minutes.

This legislation is overdue as the set up of the health boards has been talked about since I was a member of a local authority. In those days medical committees were part of the local authority and worked well. However, they were dismantled. Local democracy worked in that area and I would like to see us get back to that situation. I have always believed that if we start locally and work matters out on a local basis we will get things right.

This Bill is about setting up a new executive which will disband the health boards which are fragmented. The mind boggles at the number of people who work in the health boards. It boggles as to who to call when one has to make a phone call to get information. The health boards have sub-committees and sub sub-committees and nobody knows who is accountable in the process of how to solve a problem. It has been difficult to wait to get this sorted.

Nobody is saying that we will have all the answers overnight. However, we must start with a structure, which this new executive gives us. Let it be hierarchical rather than the fragmentation we have had over the past decade where nobody could say who was accountable for what; the fragmentation and duplication of roles meant colossal bureaucracy.

The reason we must have this overdue legislation is to achieve the aim of putting the patient first. Every family in the country would have that priority and would want to ensure that every patient gets immediate treatment ——