Varadkar: Reilly move ‘like stroke politics’
“It does look like it. I don’t know if it is or not. You know, you have to trust your colleagues to make the right decisions and make them on the right basis and I do trust Dr Reilly in that regard. But I don’t know all the details.”
The transport minister’s qualified defence will do little to ease the pressure on Dr Reilly, who survived a no-confidence motion in the Dáil last week.
Mr Varadkar is also a GP, meaning he would have an excellent understanding of the issues at hand.
However, he stressed that he was so far relying on what he had read in the papers about the primary care controversy and “often the reality is different”.
Mr Varadkar was speaking on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics last night.
Quizzed by presenter Sean O’Rourke, Mr Varadkar said he could understand why it looked like stroke politics.
“I can see why it does look like that, but you know, when you read the papers and you see what’s in the papers — and I only know the details from the papers — often the reality is different and I’d like to know a lot more about this before I profess to be an expert on it.”
Dr Reilly has denied there was anything improper in his decision to add Swords and Balbriggan in his Dublin North constituency to the prioritised list of locations for care centres.
Earlier this year, on the instructions of the junior minister with responsibility for primary care, Roisín Shortall, a list of 200 potential locations for primary care was whittled down to 20 priority locations.
However, Dr Reilly, who is at odds with Ms Shortall over a range of issues, subsequently added 15 more, including the two in his constituency.
The first location in the constituency, Swords had ranked only 130th in the original list, while Balbriggan had ranked 44th.
It emerged yesterday Dr Reilly had promised his constituents that Balbriggan and Swords would get primary care centres in June — before the revised list of 35 was published. He made the pledge in an interview with the Fingal Independent.
