Frances Fitzgerald (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister to the House and I hope that she will leave us with an understanding of the degree to which the health service, under this Government's leadership over the past ten and a half years, has failed the citizens of this country. When it comes to cancer, for example, people expect the health service should be capable of accurate, speedy diagnosis. They expect that treatment should be effective and being quickly. They expect this, they are entitled to it, but they no longer have the confidence that it will happen.

This crisis of confidence is built out of individual tragedies like those of the eight women who underwent tests at Portlaoise General Hospital and were told they were free and clear, only to find out later that they have cancer, and like the other six women who must face the agony of being retested to find out whether earlier tests failed to diagnose cancer.

The response of the Government and the HSE to this crisis in confidence in breast cancer services has been terrifying. At the outset they blamed the public for failing to accept the closure of local services. This is an attempt at distraction. I have stated already that the Taoiseach is acting like a man who has just woken up and found himself in Government Buildings, not a man who has been head of Government for ten and a half years. Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats have controlled the Department for more than ten years with Deputies Cowen and Martin, and now Deputy Harney, as Minister, yet, for example, until RTE exposed the existence of a letter from the radiology department in Portlaoise General Hospital to the hospital management, the Government and the HSE claimed they knew nothing of the matter.

Another example is the Minister's statement that she was not aware of the problems in Barrington's Hospital until August 2007. The reality is that the Department of Health and Children wrote to the HSE in January 2006 about the issues there. Why then did the Minister not know? What kind of Administration prevents early warnings from being acted on efficiently and effectively?