In a couple of weeks' time, the Minister will come into this Chamber to announce his budget proposals. It is highly likely the Department of Health will again be awarded record levels of funding, potentially in the region of €22 billion. Given the crisis caused by Covid and the more than 900,000 people now on hospital waiting lists, this level of funding is undoubtedly required. The Social Democrats will support that funding commitment if and when it comes. However, the Social Democrats differ from the Government in one important matter when it comes to the health service, namely, we do not believe in repeatedly pumping large amounts of public money into a dysfunctional health system. Money alone will not solve the endemic problems in our broken health service. In tandem with the spending commitments, we need to see urgent reform in order that everyone who needs access to healthcare receives timely care and has the best possible outcome.

The blueprint for that reform - Sláintecare - was agreed on a cross-party basis in 2017. The Government has the plans, yet it refuses to implement them. It seems the Government is not interested in reform. All it does it pay lip service to it. The Minister does not have to take my word for that. He can listen to the two senior Sláintecare managers, Laura Magahy and Tom Keane, and the former chair of the South/South West Hospital Group, Professor Geraldine McCarthy, all of whom have now resigned. They will tell him that serious institutional resistance to essential Sláintecare reform is threatening the entire project. We know where that resistance is emanating from, namely, the HSE and the Department of Health. Critically, there is also a lack of political leadership, a lack of commitment and a lack of courage at the top from the Minster for Health and the rest of the Cabinet. We will never see reform of the health service unless the political will is there to drive it in order to take on the vested interests, wherever they come from, and to ensure that the people of this country have access to healthcare based on need and not ability to pay. More than a decade ago, Professor Keane had staunch support from the then Minister for Health, Mary Harney, when he reformed our cancer services. It was a hugely controversial reform at the time. He would not have been able to do it otherwise. If the same level of political support existed today for the Sláintecare reform, would Professor Keane have resigned? The answer to that question is obvious.

I have three questions for the Minister. How does he expect the people to have confidence in the Government's management of Sláintecare when so many key people do not? Why is the Government refusing to acknowledge the serious problems that exist with the Sláintecare implementation? Is the Minister going to reappoint the members of the Sláintecare implementation advisory council, which has only eight days left in its term of office? As of yet, they have received no engagement from the Department of Health on their future.

I thank the Deputy for raising the issue of Sláintecare and the Government's commitment to the reform of our public health service. I reassure the Deputy, the House and the Irish people that the Government remains absolutely committed to fundamental reform of our health service. We are committed to the implementation of Sláintecare, which was not a one-year or a two-year plan; it was a ten-year plan.

In making the decision last year to invest a record amount of funding into our health service, the Government made a step change in improving the capacity of our public health system with funding being provided including, for example, more than 1,000 beds to be added to our acute hospital system, a significant increase in our critical care beds, and the sanctioning of an increase in staff resources within the public health system for approximately 16,000 professionals, pre-Covid to the end of this year. There have been some delays in recruitment but several thousand additional staff are now working in the health service as a result of that investment.

We have provided more than 5 million hours of home care in the current year, 2021. Again, this was a significant increase. Discussions are under way in relation to a public-only consultant contract. This is an important reform in our health service. On the critical public health function, which everyone has a renewed appreciation of, we have approval for the first time in the history of this State for a consultant-led public health function in our country, including a doubling of resources across our public health teams. These are significant manifestations of the Government's commitment to Sláintecare backed up with real funding of approximately €1.25 billion in the budget last year for new measures. Additionally, in the recent implementation report on Sláintecare, some 97% of deliverables were either achieved or were on track. A small number were not and we acknowledge that.

The Deputy did not even mention the elephant in the room. We have had 18 months of living with Covid-19, a global pandemic that has turned our health service upside down. The Deputy did not believe it was even worthy of a mention. Our front-line healthcare staff have been trying to get by, protect lives and save people. That is what they have been focused on. Despite all that, we have brought about significant and transformative change in our health system during that time by way of the investment made in the public health service. We are committed to working towards universal access, free at the point of delivery, in our health and social care system. We made a decisive step in that direct in budget 2021. I am now in discussion with the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, as part of the Estimates process for the upcoming budget.

Sláintecare is an incremental ten-year programme. It is supposed to start in year 1 and build every year from then. It seems the Minister is joining his Cabinet colleagues, in particular, the Minster for Health, in downplaying the seriousness of the crisis that now exists with Sláintecare. He refused to engage in the fundamental problems, namely, the institutional resistance to the introduction of accountability for the provision of health services and accountability for the spending of that massive budget that is in excess of €20 billion. If he persists in refusing to acknowledge that elephant in the room, we will not make any progress in this.

The Taoiseach said he wanted to meet the two senior people from Sláintecare who resigned. That was 12 days ago. No further contact has been made since then. The Committee on Health wanted the Minster to come in and explain what was going on. We have to wait three weeks for that to happen. The advisory council members met the Minster and came out saying they were no wiser.

The Government needs to stop ignoring the elephant in the room.

Thank you, Deputy.

We must hear the truth in this matter and we must have political will and political leadership from the Government. If not, Sláintecare will not succeed.

Of course the Government acknowledges that the resignations were deeply disappointing. Of course we acknowledge that.

What are you doing about it?

We need, of course, to examine the reasons that those resignations took place. The Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, has spoken directly to Laura Magahy and Professor Tom Keane. He has engaged directly with the Sláintecare implementation advisory council. He will, of course, go before the Oireachtas health committee. Yes, the Government is considering the structures that are in place and will consider the request for an extension of time by the implementation advisory council in that context. If there is a requirement to strengthen the governance structures and the arrangements we have in place for the delivery of Sláintecare, then of course we will do that. We are putting the money in place. There is absolutely no resistance within Government at a political level to delivering the reforms. This is what the people want. We have agreed, on an all-party basis, to implement it, and the Government is committed to doing so.

As another example and evidence of what we are doing, under our recent national recovery and resilience plan, we got support from the European Union in the form of €1 billion in funding, some of which will go towards a range of e-health projects, which is the future for health. We have seen the development and emergence of that over the course of the pandemic.