Let me state at the outset that I would not pretend to be an expert on the health area, just someone who uses it occasionally and is fascinated at how a sector can receive a doubling, in real terms, in its budget over a 10-year period and still offer - in places - such a ramshackle service.

There was little by the way of good news in recent days, with nurses balloting on industrial action;

claims that one hospital, last week, had only been doing private elective surgery;

and the harrowing story - told with courage and eloquence - of a woman diagnosed with bowel cancer and the delay she encountered in getting proper treatment.

But if anything summed up the insanely frustrating Irish health service, it was the decision of the directors of Our Lady's Children's Hospital in Crumlin not to cooperate with the development of a national children's hospital at the Mater site in Dublin.

How does that help anything? The fact that the decision was made without informing the chairman of the hospital's board, Dr Diarmuid Martin, beggars belief.

It's simply not good enough to argue that the archbishop generally attended one meeting a year and largely delegated responsibility to the deputy chairman and other directors. Good governance requires that if Diarmuid Martin holds the position of board chairman, he should have been made aware that such an important decision was imminent.

It is tempting to believe that this is yet another example of a vested interest trying to mind its own backyard. That may be unfair. No doubt, this issue is very complex and the people involved are acting in what they believe is the best interests of their patients. But, as a complete outsider, having listened to the respective arguments, Brendan Drumm, HSE boss, provides by far the more compelling case. Some of the spin against the Mater site over the past year has bordered on the ridiculous. Of the more rational points that have been made, it's difficult to agree with the argument that the site is too small when, as Drumm points out, it is twice the size of all existing Dublin children's hospitals put together.

Those who argue it should be on the outskirts of Dublin should consider how building something adjacent to the car park that is the M50 is somehow more accessible than a city-centre location that is serviced by numerous bus routes and a metro.

How also are the families of those receiving treatment supposed to while away the hours on a site so far removed from shops, restaurants and public transport?

What is certainly not in doubt is that the country's children will benefit from the development of a new state-of-the-art national children's hospital.

The decision has been made; it does seem to have been done independently - and if anybody is suggesting otherwise, they need to provide hard evidence - and the research is there to back it up. You are never going to get a situation where everybody is happy with that decision. It's time the moaning and giving out stopped, and the hospital was built.

Further evidence that we are not getting full value for the Euro14.5bn we will spend this year on health came from the BBC's fascinating three-part documentary Can Gerry Robinson fix the NHS? , last week.

Yes, the programme was about the British National Health Service, and particularly one hospital in Yorkshire, but anyone who has had even the smallest dealings with Irish hospitals would have recognised that the problems were identical. My colleague Kevin Rafter deals with the programme in greater detail elsewhere on this page. But, in brief, Robinson found dozens upon dozens of highly dedicated, hard-working and conscientious nurses, doctors, consultants, anaesthetists and administrators, as is also clearly the case in Ireland.

The problem was that they weren't all pulling together and were often at loggerheads over the hospital's woes. Potential solutions to difficulties were routinely dismissed as being 'not possible'. Operating theatres were lying vacant on Friday afternoons, despite long waiting lists, because it had always happened that way.

Nobody was in charge (except arguably the consultants). Nobody was managing.

For those of us who always instinctively believed that addressing the health services was not only about pouring in more and more money and providing more and more beds and more and more staff - and who wondered, for example, why even when A&E was virtually empty, it still seemed to take hours to be treated - the programme was a real eye-opener.

But despite spending much of the programme looking utterly exasperated and continually running into brick walls, Robinson did provide a ray of hope. He showed that with tough, firm management - and working in tandem with all the staff (basically, implementing good business practice) - improvements could be made and results achieved.

Why does it take a TV programme to deliver that? I, for one, am sick of hearing who is to blame for the underperforming health service. I really don't care if it's Mary Harney, the unions, the consultants, the administrators etc, etc. It's long past time that people stopped talking about the problems and dealt with the solutions.

Getting on with the job of building a children's hospital at the Mater site seems like a good place to start.