Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

No. I pressed the right button. Whoever is the Minister for Health will be very proud to open that facility. I have no doubt if I am looking on from a distance at the photographs of the people at the opening, there will be many people there whooping, hollering, clapping and cutting ribbons who probably criticised and threw rocks at the project through its entire gestation. On that day I will quietly chuckle, knowing that we did the right thing by the children of Ireland.

I agree with Senator Colm Burke's comments on the elective hospital in Cork. I will keep in touch with him about the collaboration between the local authorities in that regard.

Senator Devine made a point about private hospital beds. I want to tie that in with a point Senator Buttimer made about vested interests. Everybody in this House and the other House and everybody everywhere says they are in favour of Sláintecare. We will have to get real soon and stop being in favour of only the nice and fluffy stuff in Sláintecare. There are some real hard decisions we are going to make.

It is wrong if an elderly person in an emergency department on a trolley cannot get a bed while upstairs in the hospital a consultant is being paid a private income for using our public beds, public salaries and public electricity. Meanwhile, Mrs. Murphy in the emergency department cannot access a bed because she cannot afford private health insurance. We will stop that. We will decouple private practice in public hospitals. Consultants can continue to do their private practice in a private hospital. We will need to pay our consultants more and have more resources.. This is not easy to do. The de Buitléir report shows us how to do it. I was fascinated and a little alarmed watching the proceedings of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health today and noting that not every member of that committee and not every spokesperson on health would say, as I will say here, that it is wrong that private practice is taking place in public hospitals. We would not tolerate that in our education system. Donogh O’Malley , a reforming Minister for Education, called it out with respect to secondary education and said it was not right that a person could not access secondary education if he or she could not afford it. We now need to say it is not right that private practice is going on unabated in our public hospitals. We need to show leadership in that regard.

I thank Senator Devine for her comments about the primary care centres. The challenge, as she rightly put it to me, is that we have to make them busier. That will be some of the work of the Sláintecare and 1,000 extra staff that will be recruited. We are ten months into the year as we are talking about the capital plan, but I would rebut that by pointing out we are not just talking about 2019 capital plan. We are talking about a three-year horizon in that regard. The Senator will not be surprised that I disagree with her comment that it is a vague capital plan. There are 250 projects outlined in it. People want to keep talking about one project, the national children’s hospital. There are 249 other projects in it spread throughout the country. Just like the education capital plan or anything else, it is a list of all that we intend to do over the next three years.

I am conscious of my time but I want to respond to some of the points colleagues made. Moving on to the comments of Senator Murnane O'Connor, my neighbour, who I think keeps saying she is my neighbour because she is getting a bit of my constituency back into her constituency and she must want to get my votes in Rathvilly and Hacketstown, but so too does my colleague, Deputy Deering, I acknowledge the fact that the Senator manages to find me no matter where I go in Ireland and to advocate on behalf of her constituents.