The Government is planning to use the local elections next summer as a vehicle to wind down the State's health boards, it emerged yesterday.
The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, said on Wednesday that legislation to reform the health service could take 18 months to prepare. But political sources said change at the health boards was likely to come sooner than that.
With the next local election due in a year's time, the sources said the most logical Government manoeuvre was to avoid reconstituting the health boards after the poll.
Local authority members make up a significant part of health board membership. But the boards have to be reconstituted after every local election to reflect the new membership of the local authorities.
With the Government now committed to the closure of all the health boards, this is unlikely to happen after next year's election.
If legislation to close down the boards has not been passed by then, the boards will function after the election on only an interim basis, pending their dissolution.
Avoiding the reconstitution process would provide the Government with an incentive to introduce the necessary legislation. However, such a move would be seen as the closure of health boards by stealth by critics of the plan.
The replacement of the health boards with four regional agencies that will not be controlled by local politicians was widely seen as one of the most controversial aspects of the plan.
While critics of this part of the plan have described it as the death of local democracy, sources said that relatively little opposition was expressed by Fianna Fáil TDs when Mr Martin explained his plans to them at a parliamentary party meeting on Wednesday.
In any event, the ending of the dual mandate next summer means that existing TDs will be standing down from local authorities. As such, they already stood to lose membership of the health boards.
The strategy of winding down the boards is expected to be outlined in the coming weeks by Mr Martin as he proceeds on a three-month consultation process to explain the reform plan.
Mr Martin travels to his own political base in Cork today to make a presentation to staff of the Southern Health Board.
The meeting will be the first of a series of State-wide visits, which will bring him to Limerick on Monday, in which he will attempt to sell the reform initiative to the 96,000 staff in the sector.
While the Brennan Commission which examined health funding said the health boards should be retained to protect local democracy, the Government decided against that.
The four regional health agencies will act as the regional offices of the new Health Services Executive, which will have day-to-day control of the entire health system.
The Government plan says they will be responsible for planning, commissioning and funding all non-acute services and supporting health promotion.
Acute hospital services will be managed by the new National Hospitals Office, also responsible to the Health Services Executive.