John Crown (Independent)

I also welcome all my colleagues back. I want to start by briefly paying a personal tribute to the late Ms Mary Raftery, who I have known, off and on, since I was a teenage student in University College Dublin. Her body of work speaks for itself and all I can say is if all lives were lived so well, the world would be a better place.

I want to follow up briefly on the reference to Archbishop Brown and the fact that he used be involved with the office for the propagation of the faith. To remind my senatorial colleague, that was formally known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition. It had a name change at some stage. Perhaps it might be a good idea if Archbishop Brown would bring some of the skill set from the history of that organisation here to conduct some of the investigations into the banking sector.

On a serious issue, the debate about hospital services - local versus central, centres of excellence versus local access - is one that needs to be conducted in a calm and rational fashion. With good heart, honesty and thoughtfulness, people will come to different conclusions. It is something which should be decided, probably not in parliamentary chambers but in areas where experts and local representatives can come together and see the pluses and minuses of it. I do not wish to get into it. It is a major issue.

I feel strongly, however, about the issue of honesty in politics and I am sorry but there is a big, unresolved wound, which opened over the course of 2011 and was only really fully exposed at the meeting of the Joint Committee on Health and Children on 8 December. That refers to the promises which were made pre-election by the then designate Taoiseach, Tánaiste and Minister for Health with respect to the retention of services in Roscommon hospital. I do not wish to get into the rights and wrongs of whether those services should or should not have been retained. Fine arguments can be advanced in good faith on both sides, but I am troubled by the sequence of events which, it has now emerged, led to the decision to make a U-turn from what were pre-election opposition party electoral promises to Government policy and which resulted in the 24 hour emergency services in Roscommon being closed.

It now appears that we are being told that the original decision was made by the HSE following a recommendation by HIQA. This decision was then supported by figures, which were reported by the Minister for Health in the other Chamber and in public, which suggested that the disparity of mortality for patients who were admitted to Roscommon or Galway hospital with a heart attack was 5% versus 20%, tying his hands and preventing him-----