In the programme for Government, a colossal €15 billion is laid out for the Department of Health. Despite this, and as no one knows better than the Taoiseach, who is a medical doctor, we have the most extraordinary waiting list of up to 700,000 people. According to comments attributed to him in today's edition of The Irish Times, the Taoiseach is hoping to arrive at a situation where at least two patients per week will not be referred by their GPs to hospital. With 2,500 GPs, that would amount to 20,000 patients per month, which would be a great way of reducing the waiting list. How does the Taoiseach propose to do this? Does he realise that most of our GPs are overstretched, overworked and deeply stressed? I cannot see this working. Perhaps the Taoiseach might reveal to the House how he proposes to turn this situation around in the way suggested in The Irish Times.

I did not read the article, but I know what I said. What I said was that if the average GP referred two fewer people to specialists each week, that would be 5,000 fewer referrals a week and 20,000 fewer referrals a month and, without any additional capacity at all in our hospitals, we would see waiting lists fall. How could that be done? In two ways. First, provide GPs with better access to investigations so that they do not need to send somebody to a specialist who then sends him or her for a scan, scope or whatever. They could have direct access to investigations. We are starting to make that happen, but it is happening far too slowly. The other aspect, of course, is to allow and fund more GPs to perform more procedures themselves, for example, minor surgeries. When I was the Minister for Health, I started that - allowing GPs to do minor operations and be paid for them rather than referring patients to specialists.

The second way is accountability. We do not actually monitor referral rates by GPs, so we do not know who are the ones who refer too many patients and we do not know who are the ones who are appropriate and efficient in their referrals. Other countries do, and they can identify GPs who are over-referring and take action to encourage them to be more appropriate in their referrals. They can identify the GPs who refer appropriately and do not refer very often. They actually get fast-track access to specialists. That is what is done in other countries and we should do it here.

Why does the Government not do that?

Resistance, as always. Deputy Howlin knows all about it.