I agree 100% with the comments made by Senator Paul Daly who passionately explained the crisis facing tillage farmers across the country. The crisis is not confined to that sector. The common denominator across all of the farming sectors is price, an issue raised whether one is talking to farmers at the National Ploughing Championships or, as I have done in the past week, in County Donegal. It is the issue in all sectors. I ask the Leader to invite the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine back to the House. He was here during Farm Safety Week, but we had a limited debate. We need to debate the issue of price and what the Government's strategy is to address and protect the interests of farmers.

The second issue is the health service. Senator Colm Burke talked about surveys and staff. I agree with him that when people get into the health service and hospital, their experience is positive. We have fantastic front-line staff across the State. The difficulty is getting into hospital and onto waiting lists and the chronic underinvestment in health services for a long time. If we are serious about tackling this issue, that means investment and looking at primary health services and hospitals across the State. There is a real problem with the way hospitals are funded. Let us look at funding for Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda and the Letterkenny University Hospital. The fairest way is to base funding on the number of inpatients. My local hospital is Letterkenny University Hospital which is the sixth largest hospital in the State. However, the financial allocations to such hospitals can be two to three times more in favour of Dublin hospitals. I appreciate there are specialties available at Dublin hospitals and that, therefore, they should receive more funding, but they receive far too much. I ask the Leader to convey my point to the Minister for Health and ask him to consider the funding model used for hospitals. It discriminates against hospitals in the regions and, therefore, needs to be addressed.

I agree with Senator Pádraig Mac Lochlainn that we need to review the health service, but, equally, money is not the only cure. During Fianna Fáil's 14 years in government, it quadrupled spending on health services, but the situation was as bad as it ever was. I am not trying to score political points, but that is the reality. There will always be a demand for hospital services. They are important because the most acutely ill arrive at hospital emergency departments. We must also take a longer term view and invest in primary care services. With the competition between primary care and secondary care services, hospital care always wins out. The position will not improve until we grasp the nettle and invest money aimed at prevention. As I have said before, it is much easier for politicians to hail a new ward and new CT scanner than it is to hail and support a public health initiative or primary care facility which will do much more good and save many more lives in the long run. Many end up in hospital because they have been unable to access care in a timely fashion, their diagnosis has been delayed and not enough emphasis has been placed on prevention. I did not wish to speak about this matter today, but I support what was said. We need to put more funding into primary care services. I was a GP and have returned to general practice, but I can see that the position is getting increasingly worse. I will not go into the individual cases that have come to my attention in the past few weeks, which are quite worrying.

I want to raise another matter along the lines of prevention, namely, sports grants. There has been much discussion about restricted funding and the fact that we might not have sports grants. Sport is hugely important, a fact we all acknowledge. It is very important for the development of young people, the cohesion of communities and teaching young people, in particular, that teamwork is important and how strength comes from co-operation rather than individualism. There is an old Irish saying, ní neart go cur le chéile, which means that we are stronger when we work together. I cannot finish talking about sport without mentioning the fantastic victory of the Dubs and the great display by Mayo. I congratulate both teams because it was an outstanding match.

I call on the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Shane Ross, to ensure sports grants continue. We were able to allocate them in the worst of times. In the depths of austerity we put money into communities and sports facilities for young people to give them a safe place to expend all of their energy. This is a wonderful, natural attribute of youth. We must not renege on our policy in this regard at a time when circumstances have improved. Undoubtedly, they have not improved as much as we would like or for everyone we would like to see have a better existence, but sport is a great unifier and needs to be supported. The Minister needs to ensure funding is made available for this purpose.

Senator Paul Daly referred to the difficulties being experienced by tillage farmers across the country. I support the call for the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine to intervene in the ongoing crisis faced this year by farmers.

I support Senator Paudie Coffey's call for the Minister for Health to come to the House to talk about hospital groupings and funding for the hospital network across the country. Senator Pádraig Mac Lochlainn also touched on this issue which requires drastic attention. The model used to fund the health care sector needs to be reviewed, as it does not provide value for money for the taxpayer. There are serious questions to be asked. I agree with the former Minister for Health and Children, Senator James Reilly, that money will not resolve all of the issues within the sector. Their resolution is very complex. Until such time as all health expenditure follows the patient, we will never achieve value for money in the sector and will always face crisis after crisis. Every politician will be referring to crises in various areas and hospitals on different days every month until an holistic approach is taken to resolving the health crisis. This partly involves the sports capital grant, as referred to by Senator James Reilly. Until we target problems such as obesity, we will not be working holistically and will have only a knee-jerk reaction to the health crisis. There is a bigger picture to be considered. Politics should be kept out of it in so far as possible. I acknowledge that there is a ten-year strategy committee, but the Seanad should address the issue, bearing in mind that we can avail of the expertise of a former Minister, Senator James Reilly. We should examine it on a cross-party basis. Let us come up with some suggestions, if possible. Let us park politics outside the room and come up with constructive arguments, some of which might be on the economic side and others on the health or community side. Let us come up with some strategy that the Seanad could provide for the Department of Health. If we were to do so, we would be doing the State some service.