Roisin Shortall

We spent 11 months drawing up that plan and we had expert advice nationally, especially from a team in Trinity.

And we had a lot of international expert advice and we consulted very widely.

agreed by everybody and all parties.

OK, so this is a first in Irish politics in terms of policy development.

It's something, of course, that should have been done many, many years ago.

You know, the NHS in the UK was set up almost 80 years ago.

Right across Europe, other countries approved fully functioning universal single-tier health services.

We're an outlier in that regard and we need to play catch up very quickly.

But now we are eight or nine years on from that agreement, Sláintecair being agreed.

Yeah, and I'm not trying to justify in any way the delays and it's been very disappointing.

You know, it came out, the report came out in 2017.

That government and minority Fine Gael government, they talked a lot about Sláintecair, but it was lip service mainly.

That was followed then by a couple of years of COVID.

Now, the whole sludge care thing was put on hold and shouldn't have been during that.

And then Stephen Donnelly, you know, realised what it entailed.

He hadn't been involved in the production of the report at all.

And he introduced a number of important measures, start at important measures.

And, you know, the challenge now is for the current minister, Carol McNeill, to carry on that.

And I think what we've seen over the last couple of weeks where that important principle of public only work in public hospitals has been upheld.

And I think that's a really important milestone in health care reform.