Moves to involve the private sector in building hospitals has generated heated debate, not least among the political parties.
At the weekend, Labour leader Pat Rabbitte called on Health Minister Mary Harney not to sign any more contracts for private hospitals before the next general election.
Speaking in Cork, he also accused the private sector of cherry-picking the profitable parts of medicine and the Government of pushing a two-tier health service.
"Let us not have for-profit medicine by the backdoor, with contracts being signed in the dying days of a government," he said.
"These super-private clinics do not come free. They are being built with expensive tax-breaks."
Referring to the co-location of hospitals, he said the land being used for them could not be replaced.
"Even if the investors pay market rates for the land, we are talking about land on the sites of public and voluntary hospitals," according to Rabbitte.
"It is land that should be used for other purposes, such as building community nursing beds, or acute hospital beds for the existing hospital."
Rabbitte dismissed Harney's argument that the private clinics would release 1,000 beds for use by public patients.
"Consultants in Irish hospitals have contracts which allow them to engage in private practice.
"Why should they agree to surrender the beds they currently use for that practice, and negotiate new deals with the super-private clinics?"
Fine Gael also claims that the plan to build private hospitals on grounds of public hospitals will be detrimental to both patients and taxpayers.
Fine Gael's spokesman on health, Dr Liam Twomey, last week called on Harney to publish any cost-benefit analysis undertaken by the Department of Health on the issue - if such analysis had been undertaken.
"The best way forward is for private hospitals to compete with each other and with public hospitals, which is in the best interests of competition and patient care.
"I believe that linking private hospitals to public hospitals in the way the Minister proposes will have the opposite effect," he said.
Twomey also argued that patient care would suffer if the co-location plans go ahead.
"The public hospitals will lose consultant time to private hospitals - during the day when patients will be under the care of less-experienced staff," he said.
The Government was also criticised by Waterford Labour deputy Brian O'Shea, who said around 1,000 patients had to travel every year from the Waterford area to Dublin or Cork because of a lack of radiotherapy services at Waterford Regional Hospital.
He said plans to set up these services at the hospital would not be completed until 2011, under a public/private partnership project.
"By taking the public/private partnership route, the people of Waterford and the southeast won't have their radiotherapy service for another five years at the earliest," he said.
O'Shea said radiotherapy treatment for both public and private patients could be provided "in the very near future" at Whitfield.
O'Shea said "the Taoiseach said when he was in Waterford that he knew that the Whitfield Clinic had approached the HSE on providing radiotherapy services to public patients".
"However, there is absolutely no indication that the funding is going to be provided by the Department of Health for the HSE to fund patients needing radiotherapy at the centre," he said.