To highlight the Government record on the health services the Fine Gael leader, Mr Michael Noonan, yesterday visited a hospital extension which has lain empty for over five years. He said it summed up the failure of Fianna Fáil and the PDs on dealing with the health crisis.
Speaking in the €45 million wing of Mullingar Hospital, which remains a concrete shell, Mr Noonan accused the Government of having total disregard for the health service and the people who work in it. The four-floor extension was never equipped and staffed.
"It looks like a series of hangars in a rundown airport with people waiting to get into hospital while waiting lists continue to grow," Mr Noonan said. Despite more than doubling health spending the system was as inefficient and unfair as when the Government came into office.
If ever there was a monument to the inefficiency, incompetency and disregard for the health service this was it, he said on RTE.
The Government, he said, had presided over ever-increasing waiting lists, which now stood at over 26,000. There had been a loss of vital hospital beds because of nursing shortages. Nurses, he said, had been driven on to the picket line because of low morale.
Fine Gael, he said, would double the income limits for medical cards; give free GP service to children, under 18s, students and pensioners; and give everyone a free annual health check which, he said, would dramatically improve the standard of people's health.
Mr Noonan said that when the Government should have spent the last five years on reforming the health service, it just "threw money at it without attacking the root causes of what was wrong. The Taoiseach, was living in fantasy land, he said, having described the health services as "excellent and well-resourced".
"The health crisis is not just about spending money. It's about misdirecting and mismanaging what is spent," said Mr Noonan.
Fine Gael would cut out the waste and duplication and overlap that undoubtedly existed, and put the money to work in improving care to the patient.
"We will deliver. We will provide the staff, the resources, the vision and commitment to achieve a world-class health service for patients and those who deliver their care," the Fine Gael leader said.