Sheila Terry (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I support the motion. While we are all interested in providing additional hospital beds and I am supportive of any individual who would like to build a private hospital, our objection is that the Government proposes to provide public land to developers to build such hospitals. These lands are in public ownership and the people have a right to demand that they should be retained in public ownership or should be used to deliver public services. The best use the land could be put to is to provide step down beds, which are badly needed. This, in turn, would release beds in public hospitals. We have spoken ad nauseam in the House about the need for step down beds but the best way to provide them is to use public lands, thus reducing the cost of doing so. By giving land to private developers, we are reducing our capacity to deliver step down beds and to develop our public hospitals.

Tomorrow the Government could decide to give a number of acres of public land to a developer to build a private hospital but, in five years or more, if additional land is needed to extend public hospitals, that will not be possible because the Government will have given away the land. I live in Dublin 15 and it is proposed to build a private hospital on the grounds of the James Connolly Memorial Hospital. I was a member of Fingal County Council when we had to take a tough decision to sell some of the hospital's land for private development. Given that the hospital had a lot of land, we were safe in the knowledge that even if the land in question was sold, there would still be acres available for the future development of the hospital.

I am concerned that additional public lands will be sold to people who are only interested in profit. They will not be involved to provide health services to the people because they will have seen an opportunity to make a profit. While there is nothing wrong with that and I support the free market, anyone who sets up a business must source land and pay the going rate for it before making a profit. The State should not part fund the sale of these lands.

We must look to the future and how additional beds will be provided. First, they should be provided in hospitals on public land. Beds should also be freed up by ensuring elderly people are not kept in hospital for longer than they should be. Our primary care system should be developed. For how long have we heard about the need to develop such care? What progress has been made? If more general practitioners were available at night and on weekends, more beds would be freed up and this would release the pressure on accident and emergency departments. The Minister needs to do much more to free up beds.

The Government is being led by the Progressive Democrats down the privatisation route and we only need to examine the US health service to see how badly people are being served. A two-tier society is being created in the State and those with private health insurance will pay more for services. That is happening in the US where private companies are vying for business but inequities are emerging. That is the route the Government is taking and that represents a bad day's work. On the question of whether the Government is closer to Berlin than Boston, the State is moving closer to Boston every day and this decision is another step in that direction.

Fine Gael is not opposed to private enterprise and to people developing private hospitals if they wish but they should not do so at the expense of the taxpayer. While there is a need for additional hospitals beds, this is not the way to do it. Private developers will get involved to make profits and they will cherry pick sites. They will also cherry pick staff from public hospitals. Eleven new hospitals will compete for staff at a time the health service is experiencing a staff crisis. Staff can be attracted from abroad and while we are happy to have recruited excellent foreign doctors and nurses, that is not sustainable in the long term. In addition, other countries are being deprived of their best medical staff. The Minister did not refer to how these hospitals will be staffed.

A private enterprise will set its own pay scales and there could be inequities between the pay of private and public hospital staff. Many issues need to be thought out but the Minister's proposal to sell public land, even at commercial rates, is not the way to address them and that is our major concern.