There are well over 1,000 for-profit hospital beds in this country. Advertisements on the radio constantly push private hospitals and clinics, claiming “because you deserve better”. These ads turn my stomach. Who exactly deserves better? Do people with money for private healthcare deserve better than low-paid workers or single parents? The ads claim these hospitals and clinics have the most renowned specialists in the field. According to whom? Consultants in the public health system compete for senior positions and are engaged in constant professional development. Private consultants can just hire a suite in a private clinic and set up practice with nothing like the same rigorous oversight.

Private hospitals treating cancer piggyback on public multidisciplinary teams for opinions and reviews. Why are they not charged for this? Patients experiencing complications in the private sector are routinely transferred to the public hospitals for more advanced care. Is it right that private hospitals can do this without paying? When private hospitals are full, they send their overflow patients to public emergency departments. Is this not a serious dereliction of duty which makes a mockery of these adverts? How can they claim to be better on access when their emergency departments run on office hours and use the public hospitals as a pressure valve to deal with many issues?

The Government and the Fine Gael Party are wedded to an ideology of the privatisation of our healthcare system. The Government has allowed a wing of the new national children's hospital to be built for private beds. It buried the de Buitléir report on how to remove private practice from the public system. We also need to fully establish Fianna Fáil’s stance on this issue as it is unclear.

It is the same as Fine Gael’s.

The Labour Party’s is unclear as well.

Only the other day, a former health Minister, Senator James Reilly, was touting the development of a €50 million private hospital in Fingal which will charge the HSE to deliver public services. He was also happy to confirm that the Taoiseach met the developers and was happy to do so.

When did this happen? The Taoiseach needs to explain the logic behind this. There is a false economy in the idea the private sector will build this hospital. It will get back every euro of the €50 million and more by making a profit on every outsourced operation and service the State should and could deliver on a non-profit basis. Already there are five private hospitals on Dublin's north side. Fine Gael is not serious about the Sláintecare report and the Government, through its actions, keeps reinforcing the public-private divide in healthcare.

When will Fine Gael finally commit to the investment needed to end the shame of Ireland being the only country in the EU without universal healthcare? Why is the Government permitting the construction of more private hospitals, which runs totally against the implementation of the Sláintecare report? Will the Taoiseach explain why he met these developers in the middle of the process?

One of the first things the Government did from a healthcare perspective, within weeks of taking office, was to try to get agreement across all parties in the House to an approach to healthcare that would be consistent regardless of who was in government over the next ten years. We are committed to this process. Like other parties in the House, Deputy Kelly's party signed up and committed to an approach that we are now following. The Sláintecare vision is to achieve a universal single-tier health and social care system where everyone has equal access to services based on need and not ability to pay. The Deputy is trying to label my party as one that is pursuing healthcare with an ideological lens. I am not quite sure why he is doing so because the facts do not bear it out.

The implementation of Sláintecare reform is a priority for the Government and the Department of Health. We all recognise this is a long-term process but we need to continue to progress it. The Sláintecare action plan for 2019 includes a specific work stream on access and waiting lists. Sláintecare emphasises the need to invest in increased capacity, which is happening, while shifting the balance of care from hospitals to community services for better health outcomes and a more sustainable health service. Reducing waiting times for patients for hospital operations and procedures is a key priority for the Government. Obviously, the focus is on the public health system and not the private health system.

We have a challenge in terms of the transition, as the Deputy knows well. We need to make sure we use private hospitals and primary care facilities outside a hospital setting to ensure we can keep people out of hospital and when there is overcrowding in public hospitals that we have routes to try to deal with it in terms of waiting times and trolley numbers. This is what the National Treatment Purchase Fund is about in terms of sourcing bed capacity and operational capacity for much of the work that should be happening in public hospitals but cannot happen because of overcrowding or undercapacity. There is a role for private hospitals in the short to medium term. In future, there may also be a role for them if people want to pay more for a certain type of treatment. However, we must get to a point where, in terms of standards, healthcare provision is not linked to income or ability to pay for a different type of hospital experience. This is what Sláintecare is all about. It is what my party supports and, as far as I am aware, it is what virtually every other political party in the House has also supported.

What the Tánaiste has said emphasises what I said previously. He said that in the short to medium term we will move across to Sláintecare. I spent 11 months on Sláintecare. The Tánaiste would not be supporting the building of a new private hospital in Swords if he believed in what he said. We are practising health apartheid in this country as far as I am concerned. In his response the Tánaiste claimed to be implementing and supporting Sláintecare and that he is committed to it so let us test this theory. We know all complex medical cases are dealt with in the public health system, along with all major operations and all serious accident and emergency issues. Does the Tánaiste agree with me, on the record of the Dáil as a matter of fact, that the public health system has a much greater claim to enjoy the term "the most renowned specialists in the field of medicine in Ireland", as opposed to the private health system? Does he agree, and this would be a very important signal from the Government, that advertising by private hospitals needs to be regulated, if not banned, in the same way that we outlaw the advertising of prescription medicines directly to patients?

Advertising is regulated. If people are making claims that are not accurate, there need to be consequences. I accept that. I also accept we have to have a public health system that delivers the best outcomes for complex healthcare in all areas. We cannot have a situation where public hospitals are substandard compared with private hospitals. That is not acceptable. The whole point of Sláintecare is to achieve a universal single-tier health system where people, regardless of their background, income, where they come from, who they know or anything else, can expect to have the same standard of healthcare in terms of patient outcomes as anybody else. This is the point we need to get to and it will probably take us a decade to get there. I hope it will involve consistency of approach to the implementation of Sláintecare regardless of which parties are in government over that period.