Marc MacSharry (Fianna Fail)

I support the amendment to the Order of Business tabled by Senator Ó Domhnaill. I also agree with Senator Darragh O'Brien who tabled an amendment to the Order of Business calling on the Minister for Health to come to the House. A number of serious issues have arisen in the past week, in particular. We have seen the health overruns and the conditioning of the public that the troika is insisting on health cuts. I was part of the Fianna Fáil delegation which met the troika last week and that question was specifically put to it. The troika was unequivocal in stating that the budget would be set by the Government of the day. In regard to the health savings promised by the Government in terms of the generic drugs bill - we will see what emerges from the debate later in the week on that - and cutting the cost of agency staff and of private nursing home beds, in particular, we have seen no action over the past 16 months.

I welcome the people in the Visitors Gallery from Thurles, which is quite a distance from my part of the country. However, we certainly have much in common. We have all lived through the set piece of the ministerial commitment to the restoration of services which is followed up by the local Deputies taking the credit on the local airwaves - in their case Tipp FM while in mine Ocean FM. The follow on set piece is the commitment being reneged on.

These are callous political gestures which are disgraceful in the extreme. Whatever about a pre-election commitment being reneged on, which is inexcusable, to make a commitment at a meeting in November, quite some time after the election, and then to renege on it-----