Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Senator says people are only in the health system to make large sums of money. That is not true. There are very dedicated and committed individuals who are providing health care and many of them are doing much more than what their contracts require. We need to be conscious of this in any debate on the health service.

We also need to be careful how we proceed on the issue of junior doctors. I am not satisfied that we are doing enough forward planning and I am concerned that we will face major problems in June 2013 unless we do more. In our debates on health care it would be constructive if we looked to the future rather than the past. By all means we should examine the mistakes we made in the past but we should not focus solely on them.