General Practice and Local Health Services: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2024-03-20
============================================================

Carol Nolan (IND), Laois-Offaly

I support this motion, which in many ways replicates some of the points that my colleagues and I have raised recently about local access to healthcare. In particular, I support the motion’s call to establish a multidisciplinary working group on the development of primary care and for the Government to launch a pilot programme in areas where there is a shortage of GPs for out-of-hours services and leave cover.
In my constituency, we are finally seeing the development of the Birr primary care centre after a long wait and a rather complicated process. I fought hard to keep that primary care centre for Birr on the political agenda in the Dáil and engaged continuously with the HSE over the past number of years. I commend the HSE on giving its final sign-off.
In terms of local health services, I wish to mention the ongoing crisis in our dental services. Offaly and Laois are particularly badly impacted. The number of children being failed by the current contract arrangements is mind-boggling. We have major deficits right across the board in health and a chronic lack of services, including elective surgery capacity at the regional hospital in Tullamore, which is of serious concern. We need an elective surgery hub for Tullamore hospital. I hope that will happen.
For now at least, I commend the motion and offer my support to it.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2024-03-20/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:47+00:00
Sitting date: 2024-03-20