The Government will not be able to honour its general election promise to eliminate waiting lists by June this year, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, has conceded. Mark Hennessy, Political Correspondent, reports.
Questioned about the promise, he told RTÉ: "We won't achieve that.
"... We will dramatically reduce waiting lists. I think clearing waiting lists totally under specialities will never happen. We have said that we would reduce waiting lists permanently. We won't get them totally," he said.
"We will not have the dramatic figures that we had where people could not get into radiotherapy. We are three years ahead of our programme on cancer."
Speaking to RTÉ's Week in Politics programme, Mr Ahern said he had, nevertheless, "a very good story to tell" about improvements made in recent years in that the number of people waiting for more than 12 months for treatment has been cut by 46 per cent. Cancer patients "in some cases" face no delays at all, he said.
Thirty thousand more people have been employed in the health service: "They are working every day. They are not sitting there. Nine out of 10 of those are medical personnel."
The Taoiseach accepted that local hospitals affected by the Hanly report proposals would have to be left with 24-hour doctor cover. "I think it is not saleable to the Irish public that the hospitals that are there do not have medical cover for their local community.
"People will not accept that, and I am not prepared to sell them that because I don't agree with it," he told Week in Politics.
Earlier, on RTÉ radio's This Week, the Taoiseach conceded it will be "almost impossible" for the State to comply with a new EU directive which aims to reduce the working hours of junior doctors to 58 hours a week by August 1st next.
Failing to comply with the European Working Time Directive leaves the State and hospitals or health boards employing the doctors liable to large fines.
Junior doctors now work on average 75 hours a week. The Hanly report sets out a blueprint for reducing the hours worked by junior doctors by doubling the number of hospital consultants in the State. However, no attempt has been made yet to start recruiting these additional personnel.
Mr David Hanly said last Friday he felt the August 1st deadline for reducing junior doctors' hours would not be met in a lot of smaller hospitals. He said the Government might have to go to the EU and plead that while it was making progress, it would take more time.
Yesterday when his comments were put to Mr Ahern on the This Week programme, he said it would take some time to implement the report. He added that all EU states were concerned about how they would comply with the directive in the timescale available.
"One of the areas in Europe that every prime minister is raising with me is the Working Time Directive. It's the same everywhere ... it's an enormous change in a very short period," he said.
A spokeswoman for the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, said last night there were no plans to seek a derogation from the EU on the directive and it was striving to implement it.