Ms Nessa Childers:

In response to Senator Cullinane, I do not know I can talk about the HSE here. I despair of it. The Irish health service seems to have been malfunctioning for decades. The only thing I can do is work as an MEP on legislation in the European Parliament. I work with many health groups that work here. They come to see me in Europe, with their European counterparts. I go to meetings and have round table discussions with them but I cannot change the Irish health system. That is the job of the Oireachtas. All across Europe health systems in countries that are in austerity programmes have suffered. This appalling austerity is apparently the result of a mistake in a spreadsheet which is a simplistic way of looking at it, but it may be true. Greece has suffered the most. I spoke about that before Senator Cullinane came in to the House. I can draw attention to those things. I can use political pressure on Irish legislators but it is beyond me to understand how our health service has got into the current situation. It is only partly the responsibility of the present Government. This has been going on for years.

Somehow or other we will have to change the health system. Strides are being made towards changing it to a universal health care system. There can be problems with that as well, as there are for example, in Holland. Anything would be better than what we have now but we will have to deal with it for another few years. It is not my place to talk about the HSE. The Senator's colleagues in here can perhaps answer those questions. I see how 27 other health services operate. In the EU, health is still a member state competence but the situation is so bad in some countries that at meetings people ask if, for example, in Greece, we are violating the charter of fundamental rights because of the problems people have accessing health services there. It is very frustrating but it is a member state competence. Apart from the directives we have discussed such as the cross-border health care directive, which at least gives some people some rights to health services, the tobacco directive and clinical trials directive are in our competence. I cannot talk about the HSE. It is too difficult.

Senator Quinn spoke about the horsemeat scandal. It was discovered almost by accident. The Senator is right that prior to this there have been problems around traceability in the European Union, for example, the dioxins in pigmeat. The horsemeat problem has forced the EU and those with responsibility for food safety, which is part of the remit of my committee, to examine how it does things.

What transpired was that there were massive failures. Possible fraud occurred in up to 14 European countries. As in the breast implants situation, labels were changed and people thought the product was beef but it was horsemeat. Perhaps the cost of meat was behind it. However, we must do something about it because the loss of confidence in our food has become obvious as a result. It was not only the fact there was horsemeat in products; I am not sure people liked the idea that they did not know what was in the food they were eating. As MEPs, Deputies and Senators, we must be much more careful to warn people about the content of certain processed foods.

This concerns the whole question of food labelling. I am not sure whether Members would have agreed with the traffic light system which we failed to get through the European Parliament, although we got country of origin labelling through. It was one of the regulations which was of great interest to everybody who was interested in food. I will meet Green Foundation Ireland in September on this subject. We must work very hard to ensure we do it right. The horsemeat issue was a wake up call. It should not have happened but it did.