Almost three years ago, the Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Harney, announced plans to hand over sites of public hospitals for the building of super-private clinics. She argued at the time that there were two reasons for this decision. First, she said if she provided 1,000 private beds in the hospital system a similar number of public beds would be freed up. Second, she said that doing it this way would fast-track the provision of hospital beds. We are now three years into the fast-track and none of those beds has yet materialised. The Taoiseach knows there is much opposition to this strategy among medical professionals. Several medical people have expressed the same view as the Labour Party about this strategy, that it is effectively creating one hospital system for people who are well-off and a different system for the poor, for those who are not well-off.

This time last year we were in the middle of the general election campaign and it is clear that a majority of the people who ended up being elected to this House were people who opposed that strategy, including some of the people on the Taoiseach's side of the House. I remember Deputy Mary O'Rourke opposing it and I remember the Minister for Foreign Affairs opposing the private clinic in his constituency.

I have a couple of questions for the Taoiseach about this plan. First, is he still proceeding with the plan? Is the Government proceeding with what has been called the co-location plan? Second, will the Taoiseach today give the House a list of the hospitals that will be built under this plan? Third, will the Taoiseach tell the House when they will be built? Fourth, will he tell the House what will be the total cost of this plan to the public purse, both in terms of the tax reliefs that are being provided to the private developers who are to build these hospitals and the loss to the public hospital system of the income which the public hospital system would have received from insured patients?

With respect, I do not have specific answers to the questions being asked by the Deputy——

The Taoiseach was Minister for Finance for the past five years.

They are more appropriate to a parliamentary question. However, I can deal with the policy issues.

General election.

On the question of the provision of more beds in the system through the co-location method, under the traditional public service delivery system of going through the various stages of capital programme requirements, it would take between seven and ten years before all the beds could be brought on stream. The purpose is to introduce into the public service delivery system another method of delivery that we believe would be more expeditious. We believe it would be on line more than would be the case with the traditional mechanism. This is one of the reasons the Government was attracted to this particular arrangement.

The second point I would make in response to the Deputy is that it continues to be characterised as an effort to bring in a two-tier health service when the opposite is the case. The whole purpose is to, first, bring beds on stream more expeditiously than would otherwise be the case and, second, by means of the various service agreements that would be entered into, these arrangements and facilities would be available to all patients, not simply to private patients. As the Deputy will be aware, under the system currently in place there are public and private beds in public hospitals. The Minister's reason for coming forward with this idea of co-location was that the quickest way of getting more public hospital beds into the public hospital system was to de-designate what are currently private beds in the public system and turn them into public beds. The quickest way to replace those private beds, since we have a mixed system of health care delivery in this country, was to use the private sector, co-location, method to deliver private beds on public hospital sites so that the work of the consultant staff who work on the site for all patients could be integrated. The service agreements are there to ensure those facilities are available to all patients and that is the whole purpose of the plan.

Each individual hospital is coming forward with solutions in that respect to augment existing public service facilities with the co-location proposals to improve the service. The simple motivation behind this process was to free up 1,000 more beds for public patients in public hospitals and this is the reason the Government put forward this proposal. It will result in quicker delivery than the traditional public delivery method.

I have to wonder what Seán Lemass would have thought of that answer. He was a champion of public service and I cannot see him providing medicine for profit in the way the present Government is doing. I did not ask the Taoiseach for the rationale behind the strategy. I understand the rationale, but I do not agree with the thinking behind it. I did not ask the Taoiseach to repeat that here today. I want some facts.

If I am on notice of questions I can give the Deputy the facts.

The Taoiseach was Minister for Finance for the past five or six years.

The Deputy's questions are quite specific.

This, presumably, crossed his desk and, in fact, he answered Dáil questions about it last year when he told the House that the total cost in terms of tax reliefs for this approach would be somewhere between €400 million and €500 million. That is what it is going to cost the taxpayer.

That is the cost delivered indirectly.

It is going to cost the hospital system €145 million per year in lost income from insured patients. I ask the Taoiseach again, and I want him to provide answers, where will these hospitals be provided? That is not a hard question. Presumably the Taoiseach has been looking at this issue for the past couple of years. Will he give the House the list of hospitals that will be provided under this co-located proposal? We were told this would be a fast track. Will the Taoiseach give the House an estimate of the timescale for the building of these hospitals? I invite him to tell the House the cost of this proposal to the taxpayer and to the family that has health insurance. This plan of building private hospitals will end up being paid for by the taxpayer, through tax reliefs, and paid for by the ordinary families of this country, whose health insurance will be increased to pay for it. On top of that we will end up with a hospital system where one will go in one gate if one is well off and a different gate if one is not well off.

This is continual ideological blindness by Deputy Gilmore and his party to recognise that what we are trying to do here is improve the system for all patients, including public patients. That is the whole purpose of it.

It is not being done.

That is what the Taoiseach said he would do but he is not doing it.

In the same way that if we did not introduce the nursing homes tax incentive scheme——

Never mind nursing homes. I will ask about that some other day.

Let me explain. I am trying to explain something. The public is entitled to know the context in which we are bringing forward this proposal. The Deputy was misrepresenting both the motivation and the outcome of what we are trying to achieve.

Hear, hear.

He is deliberately and continually misrepresenting the position.

I asked a simple straightforward question.

Had we not used the private sector mechanism to provide thousands of nursing home beds in a short space of time, relative to had we tried to build them through the traditional system, many people in this country would not now have the beds that are required. That is a fact.

The Taoiseach——

The Taoiseach without interruption.

That is a fact. That is the first point. The whole purpose of bringing forward this proposal is about trying to improve the capacity for public patients by providing more beds as quickly as is possible.

Will the Taoiseach answer the question I asked?

I do not have the facts in front of me here this morning——

Will the Taoiseach get them?

I will have them for the Deputy in half an hour. That is the answer to that aspect of the question. In terms of the detail he wants, there is no problem in getting that. The context in which Deputy Gilmore is putting the question is to suggest that this Government is interested in having a different level of treatment for different patients.

Yes.

We are not.

The Government is——

Allow me to answer the question. In the same way as we did in regard to nursing home care——

We are not asking about that.

——we are not trying to provide differentiated treatment. The whole idea of bringing in the fair deal scheme is to give equality of treatment and equality of eligibility for people, whether public or private. That is what we are trying to achieve. It is the same with the hospital system. All we hear from people who, on the one hand, want to see capital developments in the hospital system refused, because they are blinded ideologically by the facts——

Hear, hear.

——is the suggestion that the only way one can build it is go the traditional route. If we are to have an improved health care system, as the OECD suggests, we need to look at different types of delivery systems and different models of delivery so that we can get outcomes for patients. That is what we are doing.

There is no delivery.

We are getting delivery and it is far faster than under traditional systems.

Try that with the HSE.

The Government has not provided any systems. It has done things its own way.