Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Through what forum will the Attorney General be invited to explain what happened in his office in the period leading to the events that transfixed the nation last week and the week before last? Those with political accountability will have to submit themselves to questioning in these Houses. There seems to be a blanket of silence descending around the Office of the Attorney General which has insisted he will neither comment nor resign. The office merely states it will not happen again, it was a communications problem.

This was not a communications problem, it was a fundamental policy failure. We are entitled to know what happened in the Attorney General's office on this issue, otherwise the parents of this country may feel they cannot trust that office to take every action necessary to defend children.

Yesterday it was announced that the north-eastern area of the Health Service Executive was implementing cutbacks of €10 million. This news comes a week after the State announced it has a budget surplus of €1.8 billion. I estimate that €10 million is roughly equivalent to 4,000 to 5,000 people not having access to hospital services over the next 12 months. This is a profound and fundamental issue.

There is an increasing body of evidence that suggests we are not spending enough on our health service. The ideological incantation is that we cannot just throw money at the issue. We all know this is true, it is not just throwing money at the issue. However, this does not mean that money is not part of the problem. We need a serious debate in this House on the funding of the health service. It is time we stopped repeating the same arguments. We know there is waste, we know there is inefficiency, we know all these things, notwithstanding the 100 plus people being paid €100,000. If they were doing their jobs I would not begrudge them €150,000. The problem lies in the number of people in the HSE being paid €100,000 and doing a job equivalent to €25,000.

I fully agree with Senator Norris. We have endeavoured to drag this House into confronting one small but shameful episode in this country's history, from which the entire establishment averted its eyes and which it pretended was not happening. We are now in effect condemned by the body responsible for ensuring human rights in Europe are defended, a body set up after the Second World War to ensure that the sort of atrocities which happened would never happen again in Europe. We decided that in this case, apparently, we were not going to ask the questions, were not going to look in certain places and were going to pretend for as long as possible that nothing happened. It is a shameful position for a country which makes human rights one of the platforms of its foreign policy that our response on the first occasion when confronted by a scandalous abuse of human rights, by the most powerful country in the world, was to pretend it did not happen. When some of us, including some on the Government side of the House, tried to get an agreement to investigate the matter as well as we could, we were told it would not be appropriate. I choose to believe the Members opposite have better reasons than the fact that Clare County Council was upset. I hope there was a better reason, but I have not heard it yet.