The decision by the Tánaiste and Minister for Health, Ms Harney, to stop publishing national hospital waiting list figures until 2006 has been condemned by Opposition parties.
The decision was announced yesterday by the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) which was last summer given responsibility for managing hospital waiting lists.
The Labour Party's health spokeswoman, Ms Liz McManus, said it was a crude attempt to divert attention away from the abysmal failure of the Government to honour the commitment made in May 2002 to clear all waiting lists within two years.
"This is a political stroke worthy of the worst days of the Haughey era, and I am frankly astonished that the Tánaiste, Mary Harney, would have made such a decision.
"Having failed miserably to honour their commitment on waiting lists," she said, "their priority now appears to be to cut off the flow of information to the public about the numbers on waiting lists."
Dr Liam Twomey, Fine Gael's health spokesman, said the Minister for Health had achieved in two months what had eluded all her immediate predecessors by making waiting lists actually disappear. But most people, he said, had hoped this would be done by getting more patients treated rather than creating an information vacuum around waiting lists.
The director of the NTPF, Ms Maureen Lynott, told a press briefing at Government Buildings that it was the fund which recommended to Ms Harney that she stop publishing waiting lists in the old format.
Ms Lynott said the old waiting lists contained statistics which could not be relied upon, as different hospitals had different ways of compiling them and the data had not been validated. "I do not think publishing unreliable or inaccurate data is in anybody's interest," she said.
"There aren't any figures being censored. There aren't any accurate figures to give you."
She accepted there would be concerns at the change but it was a case of continuing with a system which didn't work or moving to a new one, she said.
Under the new system, a patient treatment register will be set up, with each patient being given a patient treatment register card when placed on a surgical waiting list. The system should be in operation for the main Dublin hospitals by next July and for all hospitals by 2006.
At that stage, the NTPF will publish waiting lists for each hospital on its website and patients and GPs will be able to access them before deciding which hospital to go to.
The last waiting list figures, published in May, indicated that the Department recorded 27,318 people on hospital waiting lists at the end of 2003. When these figures were validated by the NTPF, it said there were just 19,591 patients waiting.
The Irish Times reported earlier this month that latest figures supplied by hospitals showed these figures dropped by just 1,500 during the first nine months of this year. The fund would not release this data yesterday, claiming it had not been validated.