I draw the attention of the Members of the House to an article in the front of today's Irish Examiner entitled, "HSE to restrict 20 most common surgeries", which states that access to hip replacements and skin operations will be restricted. I would be insistent that the Leader would ask the Minister to clarify for us, preferably in this House, exactly what is this change in policy. Apparently, in the State which has the smallest number of surgeons per head of population of any country in the western world and where, as a result, waiting lists balloon, there has been an increased demand for operations of approximately 22% in recent years. If one thinks this one through for a second, the HSE will decrease the demand by instructing general practitioners not to refer patients for surgeries which the general practitioners think they may need. This is as bizarre an idea as I have ever heard. One bureaucracy of the State, the HSE, is engaging another bureaucracy of the State, HIQA, to assess the appropriateness of surgeries which are referred by a small number of general practitioners to a tiny number of consultants in the country which has the longest waiting lists in the western world. This is crazy economics and crazy medicine. It is administration gone mad. The surgeries about which they are talking include the removal of skin lesions. I remind the Members of this House that Ireland has become one of the leading countries in the world for skin cancer and malignant melanoma. The number of cases and the number of deaths doubled between 1998 and 2008 and likely will increase further. When general practitioners look at a spot and wonder whether they should refer it to a surgeon to be removed, they now will have their hands stilled by the bureaucrats who are telling them not to do it. We really need urgent clarification on this. This is a far-reaching change in policy.

Let me add parenthetically, not apropos of this, that as someone who has been a frequent trenchant critic of the role the Provisional IRA and its Sinn Féin wing had in propagating the Northern Ireland conflict for 30-odd years beyond the Sunningdale Agreement because they thought they could be dumb enough to bomb the majority living in Northern Ireland into its point of view, I join the calls for a public inquiry into the depth of collusion in the death of Mr. Pat Finucane. For someone who has been an opponent of that terrorist position, it is important we know how dirty were the hands of those who in many cases we thought were less culpable in the entire problem.