Ahern interview:The Taoiseach has said that he wants a hands-on role in reforms to improve the health service over the next five years.
"The two issues that I want to get my teeth into are health and infrastructure," Bertie Ahern told Dublin's Q102 radio station.
He said efforts to establish devolved government in Northern Ireland had consumed "an enormous amount of my time" over the last decade.
"Obviously, I will keep a watching involvement in that, with Martin McGuinness and Dr Paisley, with the other party leaders, and we will build on the North-South dimension," Mr Ahern said.
"But I don't intend giving it the same amount of hours. We have a huge national plan for seven years."
However, he remains wedded to plans to let private developers establish private hospitals on public hospital lands so as to free up 1,000 beds in existing public hospitals for public patients.
"We need more beds, as quickly as possible. There were a lot of things that we cleared last year. We had the money. Brian Cowen provided the resources. But we didn't have the facilities there in the winter just gone. I am going to devote some of my energies and efforts into pulling these things together. Sometimes it is just a lack of co-ordination.
"If the Taoiseach of the day's office can be brought to bear on these issues it does help, as we have seen in so many other areas," he told the radio station.
He repeatedly stressed the need to form a stable government that would be "secure, long-term and sustainable for a four-and-a-half year, five-year term. A "strong and sound" government is needed to "implement our agenda, to implement our reforms and press on with what we are trying to do in the health service and bring it to fruition", Mr Ahern said.
Though Fianna Fáil is the largest party, with 41 per cent of the first preference vote, Mr Ahern said that he would "take account of initiatives and innovations of other parties and individuals.
"We would be totally honest and frank that we don't have all of the ideas. Clearly you would take onboard the major points of other groupings, or individuals."
The Taoiseach will meet the Minister for Finance today or tomorrow: "I hope to meet Brian Cowen in the next few days, and then we start planning in how we will build. We have commenced that already," he said.
Paying tribute again to former Progressive Democrats leader Michael McDowell, Mr Ahern said there are few people who have swapped high-earning legal careers for the tough, 70- to 80-hour-week life of a minister.
"I am very sorry for Michael. He is highly motivated and quite extraordinarily intelligent, quick-thinking and tough. His toughness often gets him into scrapes that are not always popular where he tells it as he sees it, and tells it with some ferocity. But his contribution has been immense," he said.
