If it looks like, and acts like, a stroke, then…

AS THE details of the Balbriggan primary care development emerge, its addition to the Government’s prio-rity list looks more of a political stroke than ever.

In terms of what we currently know, its progress to that list seems like a play in three acts.

The first act hinged on the fact that Balbriggan, like many areas, needed a primary care centre.

The HSE, under the previous government, selected a preferred bidder to develop such a centre at a location in at Stephenstown Business Park in Balbriggan. The deal was that the bidder would develop the facility and the HSE lease it for 25 years.

But the bidder was unable to get GPs on board and so the HSE withdrew in Nov 2010.

James Reilly, as an opposition TD for the constituency and his party’s spokesman on health, would have been monitoring these events closely.

He was already on record as saying a primary care centre for Balbriggan was badly needed.

Act two came when the HSE returned to the market to find an alternative developer for the centre.

By the time expressions of interest were being considered, circa Aug 2011, Dr Reilly had been health minister for several months.

In Sept 2011, the HSE decided to go with a proposal from a company called Rhonnelan, which was proposing to develop the centre on a site at 66-70 Dublin St.

The following month, the HSE signed an agreement to enter into a lease for the centre, subject to a number of conditions, such as planning permission being lodged within specified timeframes.

But again, there was something of a snag. Rhonnelan did not own the site on which it wanted to develop the centre. Seamus Murphy, a developer and Fine Gael member, did, and he was engaged with Nama.

Complex negotiations began on a deal for the site. In June, Dr Reilly spoke to the Fingal Independent, about those negotiations.

“There are negotiations going on and it’s down to price now and who knows the price of anything these days. We got consumed about the price of things in the past and forgot about the value of things and I haven’t forgotten about the value of things.”

This quote may explain the events in act three, when James Reilly took then junior minister Roisín Shortall’s list of 20 prioritised locations where primary care centres were to be built using public-private partnerships.

Dr Reilly added 15 locations in total, mainly, he says, in a bid to foster competition. Only 20 would actually get the green light under the PPP model. By short-listing 35, GPs would not be able to hold the HSE to ransom when it came to reaching agreement on providing services in the centres.

But why include Balbriggan on a list of centres to be considered when the HSE had already agreed a leasing arrangement to ensure the provision of such a centre in the town?

The answer seems simply to be that Dr Reilly, knowing the complexity of the negotiations that were ongoing for the purchase of the site, decided to put a fallback option in place.

If the negotiations collapsed and the HSE’s latest effort to provide the Balbriggan centre through a leasing arrangement failed, it could be developed via a PPP instead and Dr Reilly would have delivered for his constituents.

He denies that the addition of Balbriggan and another location in his constituency, Swords, to the PPP list was a stroke.

But the Government’s reluctance to publish all the files associated with the decision, Roisín Shortall’s resignation, and Dr Reilly’s own knowledge of the negotiations that were ongoing for the Balbriggan site, suggest that is precisely what it was.