Paul Bradford (Fine Gael)

I support the request to invite the Minister for Health to the House at the earliest opportunity but, in fairness, the Leader has indicated that the Minister's visit should take place in the near future. I look forward to a substantive debate with him.

Most speakers have debated either the health service or the education system. Since the foundation of the State, these two important areas of public policy have not progressed at a similar rate. Historically the debate on education was not political because there was a view that every child deserved and should be provided with a full and adequate education. While we do not have a perfect system, a good education has been available to virtually every citizen of this State. Simultaneously, however, we have taken the opposite approach to the health service by holding politicised debates on health through the years. We have suffered from that. Since I entered politics, regardless of one's view of the persons who held it, some of the top political brains in the country have held the Health portfolio, from Charles Haughey to Barry Desmond, Deputy Michael Noonan, now Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen and Mary Harney. All of these former Ministers intended to do a good job, but it never worked out in the way any of them expected. Obviously, there is something problematic at the core of the delivery of health services at a policy level. We require not only one visit by the Minister, Deputy James Reilly; we need a much more substantial debate on why the House and the political system have divided so much on the delivery of a health service and why we cannot, as we did on education issues, adopt an all-party approach to ensure every citizens is looked after properly.

I look forward to the Minister's visit and hope it will only kick-off the debate. I appreciate that he is to appear before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children and that some of our colleagues here members of that committee, but in this House of the Oireachtas we need to begin a serious dialogue with him. He has a concept of the health service which is only in its infancy. We cannot expect miracles overnight, but I hope in the next week or two we will hear from him and that we will be able to chart a way forward. There must not be only one visit, a "Hello" and a "Goodbye"; it must mark the beginning of a substantial debate. We need to change the way we engage with the health service from a political perspective because it has failed everybody. It has failed every Minister also, as he or she did not succeed in what he or she had attempted to do.