Health:The Government's plan to allow private hospitals to be built on public hospital grounds will be scrapped if Labour is elected to power, the party's deputy leader, Liz McManus, has said.
"The shambles presided over by Minister Mary Harney has been made immeasurably worse by her ideologically-driven mania for privatisation. "Private good, public bad. That is the Progressive Democrats' philosophy. Well, it is not ours," she told the party's annual conference in Dublin.
Opening the conference, Labour's president, Galway TD Michael D Higgins, warned that "vigilance will be necessary over coming months" to ensure that the Government does not approve contracts with private hospital developers that cannot be unravelled afterwards.
The PDs' philosophy on health, he said, was that "patients should pick up their beds and walk to the market-place".
Ms McManus said Labour would provide 2,300 extra hospital beds and 1,500 nursing home beds if it wins a share of power in the general election.
"It's a no-brainer. We have to have more beds to meet the crisis and to tackle the scourge of MRSA," she told conference delegates.
"The Labour Party will end the Progressive Democrats' plan to build private hospitals on public land. We will bring some common sense back into health policy," she said.
Free GP care would be given to all under-fives, and 40 per cent of the population would have a medical card. Labour's Tipperary South candidate Phil Prendergast said 35 per cent of the population had medical cards when Labour was last in government.
"Under Micheál Martin and Mary Harney this has been allowed to drop to just 29 per cent. The fall is all the more extraordinary given the economic growth the country has experienced over the past 15 years," she said.
The 40 per cent target would be met within the lifetime of the next Dáil, she said, by increasing income thresholds and giving extra weighting to children.
Free GP care for the under-fives would mean that parents could seek medical care for their children without worrying about €50-a-time doctors' fees, she said.
Calling for better mental health services for rural Ireland, Senator Michael McCarthy, who is contesting the Cork South West constituency, said more young people are now dying by suicide than by road crashes.
Teams of doctors, social workers and psychiatrists working together could help to deal with the problem, and also cut down on the need for costly in-patient care subsequently, he said.
"We will shut down those psychiatric institutions which have outlived their usefulness and which undermine the dignity of their patients," he told delegates.
Cllr Jim Townsend, one of Labour's two candidates running in Carlow/Kilkenny, said the elderly must be given extra help to stay at home.
"It is estimated that almost 90 per cent of older people would prefer to live at home rather than in institutional care. We should do everything possible to help them realise their ambition.
"During a canvass last week I met a 94-year-old pensioner who worked all his life whose doctor referred him to a consultant.
"He got word back that an appointment had been arranged for him in March 2008. Labour in government will, Labour in government must, do better than this," he said.