Professor Brendan Drumm, the Health Service Executive's (HSE) Chief Executive Officer said today that he has never actually discussed co-location with the Minister for Health Mary Harney.
Speaking on RTÉ radio's Morning IrelandProf Drumm said that the idea of co-location was "not something that has been discussed directly between myself and the Minister. The co-location of private hospitals was an initiative that took place before I actually came to the HSE," he said.
"It was a Government decision essentially to seek land on public hospital sites for the building of private hospitals by the private sector," he continued.
Co-location involves the building of private hospitals on public hospital land. It was originally proposed that ten such private hospitals would be built countrywide with the aim of alleviating the pressure on public beds by taking 1,000 private beds out of public hospitals and into the co-located hospitals.
However, media reports yesterday suggested that only four planned hospitals may actually go ahead.
Prof Drumm said he had "no problem with the amount of land we're talking about seeking, provided it did not interfere with our developments; and we have insured that that is the case".
He also insisted that the building of new private hospitals on public hospital land would not affect development of the public health system.
In a statement this afternoon Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte criticiced the Minister for Health's plans to go ahead with co-location saying that the idea was "entirely driven by the ideological agenda of the PDs".
Mr Rabbitte responded to this morning's interview with Prof Drumm by saying that his claims that Mary Harney had never consulted with Prof Drumm were "extraordinary".
"His admission that Mary Harney had never consulted with him about what the government claims is a central plank in their overall hospital strategy."
"This would appear to confirm our belief that this plan was never intended as a serious effort to deal with the bed shortage in our acute hospitals, but was rather entirely driven by the ideological agenda of the PDs," continued Mr Rabbitte.
Prof Drumm said that the HSE has agreed that for the first time ever that the private sector will be responsible for the full costs of a patient who is transferred from a private to a public facility.
"We have a system at the moment that highly subsidises private health care," he said. "That is government policy and we are quite agreeable to that policy, but there has to be an understanding that the vast majority of health care, public and private, is delivered through the public health system."