John Crown (Independent)

The Cathaoirleach should excuse me if I seem a little disoriented.

When I first arrived in the Chamber I heard Senator Norris talking about the defeat of Xerxes at Thermopylae and then heard Senator O'Donovan telling us that our fish had been taken by the Pharaohs. I thought for a moment that I had strayed into a class on the classics, until I realised that he was referring to the Faroes, which are somewhat different to the ones who led the children of Israel into slavery.

There is nonetheless some current relevance to this because Senator Norris was alluding to the fact that the Greeks raised an army of 300 men who stood shoulder to shoulder at Thermopylae and defeated 20,000 Persian intruders. This is relevant to our current situation and I am not referring to any unpleasantness with Iran or anywhere else - I am referring to the health service. It emerged in the newspapers today that there has been a 50% increase in the duration of waiting lists for patients who are awaiting day surgery. Dr. Ronan Boland, who was one of the leaders of general practice in this country, has stated that any suggestion of shortening this is met with disbelief by GPs who are referring patients because the waiting lists are now up to four years to see an orthopaedic surgeon in his area. Meanwhile, patients waiting for varicose vein surgery have had to wait six months.

This is not the high end of a life-threatening crisis, but they are the little indicators of what is happening in the health service. I ask the Leader to bring to the attention of the Minister for Health something which I am sure he knows but to which he does not allude in public. We have the smallest number of doctors per head of population for any specialty one cares to mention, and we have the longest waiting lists. Please join up the dots. It is not a shortage of bureaucrats that is causing our problem, it is a shortage of front line professionals.

While I mean no disrespect to him, I read that Dr. Martin Connor is being hailed as the saviour of the situation. This Leonidas of our small Spartan army of consultants is now only working part-time because he is spending half his time as a research fellow in Stanford University. In drawing together the two strands of our conversation today, one can say that if the HSE had been in charge at Thermopylae the movie would not have been called "300", it would have been called "30".