Michael Finucane (Fine Gael)

It is two years since the establishment of the Health Service Executive, which was supposed to herald a new dawn for health services. Anybody reading the papers in recent days will realise this new dawn does not appear to have materialised, because there seems to be increased turbulence in the health sector.

Yesterday we had a discussion on the National Development Plan 2007-2013 in which we were told €180 billion would be spent in the next seven years. Quality of life is very important to people at this time and no issue is more pertinent to that than health.

Some 27,000 members of a union, in all categories of the health services, yesterday threatened to ballot on industrial action in May. Nurses are very upset and Fianna Fáil backbenchers on a committee aired their own grievances over the situation.