The manifesto launches begin tomorrow.  Not a moment too soon after a week of bondholders and renegotiating roundabouts with added debate debates.   I went to my first press conference of the campaign today and learnt little new about Fine Gael’s plan to scrap the HSE.  Most of what I heard today was released last year by Fine Gael in their Fair Care plan (website is down at moment).

Dr. James Reilly TD  says there will be more detail on the delivery of community care services later in the week when the manifesto is launched.   Lots of emphasis on health insurance and insurance provided ‘cure’ but little on the supports provided by HSE and through HSE funding to children, older people and people with disabilities in terms of social service supports – all of which are not health matters but the state has considered them so for decades and it does not look like changing any time soon.

In short what I got today was that 8,000 redundancies across the HSE will be sought and everything will be farmed out to private bodies from hospitals to personal care with very little information so far on how it all will be regulated and what levels of customer service will be monitored – actually Dr. Reilly did not want to talk about regulation but scrutiny.   As I said I didn’t leave any the wiser.

I will be back to these issues when they emerge from the manifestos from all the parties and hope to have a look at the treatment of equality issues also.  I’m hoping for scrutiny across the blogosphere by those writing on technology, human rights and poverty to name a few areas.

The media were of course still interested on the matter of Enda Kenny’s non-appearance at the first debate on Tuesday night.  Enda Kenny said this afternoon that he is busy on Tuesday.  (This has led to #Endasnextexcuse trending on twitter)  He seemed to say he still had a problem with what Vincent Browne said but not with Vincent Browne himself but that didn’t matter now as the schedule had been finalised and he’s at a rally in Sligo/Leitrim.  He was all very relaxed about it anyway.

Audioboos on the debate questions asked of Enda Kenny can be found here – I had problems with the technology and sound levels today but hopefully will get better as it goes on.