Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

In June last year the Select Committee on the Future of Healthcare was set up. Our colleagues in the other House made sure we were barred from sitting on the committee but I will raise the issue of infrastructural development relating to hospitals.

Every week in this House people talk about the need for infrastructural development for our education system and our roads but we need to talk about it regarding hospitals. We know what is going to happen in Dublin with the new children's hospital and three new maternity hospitals but we have not looked at infrastructural development for hospitals in the rest of the country, where the population is growing in many areas but where no additional facilities have been developed in the past 30 or even 50 years. We need a 20-year plan, not a five-year or ten-year plan.

I ask the Leader for a debate on this issue. People will say we cannot deal with it until the future of healthcare document is produced but we need to do it now and we need to ensure the Department of Health is planning for these things. We should not put it off for another 12 months or two years. We have seen how long it has taken to roll out the children's hospital and we now have a problem with the roll-out of the maternity hospitals. We should include the rest of the country with Dublin in our discussion of these issues.