Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I would have voted for the Bill, although that does not mean I do not have serious reservations about certain aspects. It has the potential to improve the situation, however improvements are also needed in the Bill. It is a mistake, and will require amending legislation within 18 months. Senator O'Meara made a point about a clear mission statement. That is one way in which the Bill is wrong. We need more specificity. It is not clear how it will carry out its business. That is where the difficulty lies. The combination of issues on the objectives and rules and regulations of the plan do not fit. I do not have a problem with dissolving and replacing the health boards, as I have said many times. However, personnel were not the problem. The health boards were independent republics and there was no line of accountability. The Bill contains a provision requiring the executive to get approval for any capital investment it wishes to make. If that was included in legislation covering the health boards some years ago we would have saved ourselves millions, and would have had proper accountability with regard to spending. That was the problem at the time. I could examine and find issues that were good in every health board. However, I could also find issues which were bad.

Senator O'Meara has a valid point. The health service executive can give overall thrust and direction. There was often no thread of policy running through the health boards because they were like independent republics. We discussed one example in the House within the last year. For example, in terms of child sexual abuse and reports of such abuse, there was not a common response from the health boards. Health boards considered and approached that issue in different ways. Five years ago some boards did not have any process for dealing with it. The advantage of this system is that we can now have a common national policy which can be delivered locally. That is the plus side of it. However, we could have done something like that within the health board structure if we wanted to do so.

The broad model of what is planned in the Bill is good, but it is being rushed through because the Government tied itself into a commencement date of 1 January next. Despite the lovely words of Senator Glynn about members of the Fianna Fáil Party speaking in concert, as a disinterested observer I noted that its members were all over the place on this issue and had different views on it. They were raging about local authority members no longer being allowed to be members of health boards. I hope what the Senator said was right about the broader consultative group.