Gilmore defends Ministers in Health

TÁNAISTE EAMON Gilmore refused to be drawn in the Dáil about the “fractured” relationship between Minister for Health James Reilly and Minister of State Róisín Shortall.

Mr Gilmore said there was a strong team working in the Department of Health, and Dr Reilly and Ms Shortall were committed to delivering a reformed and improved health service.

He was responding to Fianna Fáil’s Dara Calleary, who highlighted Ms Shortall’s controversial speech during the debate this week on the motions of no confidence in the Minister for Health.

The Minister of State voted confidence in Dr Reilly, a vote the Government comfortably won. She failed, however, to mention her senior colleague in her four-minute speech to the Dáil, criticising the health service and the lack of funding for free GP care, a programme for government commitment.

Mr Calleary asked the Tánaiste if he had ever initiated discussions with Ms Shortall about “what is very apparently a broken working relationship” with Dr Reilly.

He also asked whether Mr Gilmore had discussed her concerns about delays in her being given delegated powers.

The Mayo TD said that, after 18 months as a Government Minister, Ms Shortall was still asking “very basic questions about what model universal health insurance will be based on”.

The Tánaiste, who spoke in support of Dr Reilly during the no confidence debate, told Mr Calleary the House voted by a margin of two-to-one commending Dr Reilly.

The Minister had done more in 18 months “than you did in 14 years when you were in charge of the Department of Health”, said the Tánaiste. He told the Mayo TD they were “committed to introducing a system of universal health insurance with equal access to care for all”, with an end to the “two-tier system of unequal access to hospital care”. There was “an urgency and impatience to reform our health service with less money and less staff than you had available to you”.

He had discussed the delivery of universal insurance “several times with Minister Shortall and the Minister for Health at the relevant Cabinet subcommittee and with my other colleagues”.

Mr Calleary pressed the Tánaiste about what “you have done to address the completely fractured working relationship between Minister of State Shortall and Minister for Health Dr Reilly”.

He asked him if he had made any constructive intervention “to ensure she has the support . . . she needs to do the job and help any mother or patient get GP care”.

Mr Calleary added: “Do not speak about urgency and impatience when the Minister in charge of doing the job feels she cannot do the job.” But Mr Gilmore retorted that after 14 years, Fianna Fáil had doubled the health budget and the number of people working in the sector, and this “left us with a health service that was worse than when you got it”.

He said “we have a strong team” led by the Minister, Ms Shortall and Minister of State Kathleen Lynch. “They are getting on with the job of repairing the health service that Fianna Fáil broke.”