John Gilroy (Labour) | Oireachtas source

--- would say that the current Minister is a straight-talking, dedicated public servant with no agenda other than fixing the problems that we have. It would be ungenerous of Fianna Fáil not to acknowledge that. Indeed, it would be ungenerous of anyone not to acknowledge it. The problems within the health service cannot be solved immediately, contrary to the simplistic suggestion put forward by Senator MacSharry and his colleagues that we only need to do one or two things and the whole problem will be solved. Anyone who knows anything about the health service knows that there is a chain of care from the moment someone presents to the service until he or she leaves it. A reorganisation of the HSE is what was needed.

The accident and emergency departments are the gateways to other services. The problems being presented at emergency departments are not, strictly speaking, problems of that department.; they are problems of the entire chain of care. To solve the problems requires operational and political interventions at every level of the service, not just at accident and emergency level. If the Minister announced an additional 1,000 beds to solve the accident and emergency problem, in two months time those beds would be full and the problem would continue to exist at the gateway.

Senator Ó Clochartaigh suggested that if we adopted the Sinn Féin alternative budget we would have a perfect health system. Of course, Sinn Féin's perfect budget builds castles in the sky. Perhaps we could build our accident and emergency departments in the sky too ---