Expanding Access to General Practitioner Care: Motion [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2026-02-25 ============================================================ Pádraig Rice (SD), Cork South-Central I thank Deputies from across the House for their support for the motion. GP services need more than a quick fix; they need an overhaul. This morning's debate makes that clear. I also thank those we engaged with on this motion: Deep End Ireland, the IMO, the Irish General Practice Nurses Educational Association and Doctors for Universal Healthcare, all of whom we met to discuss these proposals. I also thank the Rural, Island and Dispensing Doctors and the Irish College of GPs, whose research has informed the plan we put before the Dáil today. I also thank my own staff, Jake and Juliet, and the staff in the Social Democrats for their support. I want to respond to some of the comments made by the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell. He said the Government will not oppose this motion. That is welcome, but will the Government do it? Will it implement the 20 points we have set out in detail, and will it do so straight away? What we have in the Government, in particular from Fine Gael, is failed commitment after failed commitment. Fine Gael has now been in government for 15 years. That is almost my entire adult life. Back in 2016 it promised to roll out free GP care for children. We still do not have that and we are still left waiting. I therefore do not trust that the Government will do this, despite not opposing this motion. I urge the Government to get on with this and roll it out, fulfil the new programme for Government commitment for under-12s immediately and then set out a plan for universal healthcare for everybody by 2030. Sláintecare was mentioned, but the Government is not implementing it. The report was published nine years ago. We were meant to have free GP care by year five. Trust is broken, and it is up to the Government now to restore that, to get back on track and to deliver Sláintecare for the people. The deprivation grant was mentioned. We are calling for something different. It is not a one-off grant. We are calling for a change in the system, a weighted capitation, because we know the current system is not working. The new concentrated grant is not even being provided to some of the core GP services like GP Care For All, which did not receive the grant in the latest round. While the chronic disease management programme expansion is welcome, it needs to go further. We would like to see epilepsy included there. We would like to see severe and enduring mental health difficulties included. It needs to go further and faster. The Minister of State fails to recognise the real crisis in GP services. People are waiting weeks to get access to services and paying huge amounts out of pocket. There is constant mention of the GP review. That is now seven years old. We are waiting seven years for that and still the Minister of State comes in today and says we will get the review soon. Why does everything this Government does take so long? The common conditions services provided by pharmacists was also mentioned. The Minister of State said that is accessible to everybody. That is clearly not the case. You have to pay €30 or €35 to access that service even if you have a medical card. The most basic thing the Minister of State could do is remove that charge to make it free for everybody because at the moment not even medical card patients can access that new service. That ultimately needs to change. There is also mention of the primary care centres. Roll out of primary care centres has been so slow with just six due to open this year. The C and AG estimates it will take another 13 years to deliver the primary care centres listed for delivery in 2012. That is a shocking rate of delivery and it really needs to speed up. I also address some comments made by Deputy Tóibín from Aontú, which seems to be the first party in the Dáil to depart from Sláintecare. That is notable. He should also read the report from the Department of Health, which says that while uptake increases when you provide free GP care that will level off. I also wonder whether Deputy Tóibín is happy for half the population to continue paying huge sums of money out of pocket just to see a GP. It is up to €100 to see a GP. I wonder if the Aontú leader is happy with that. I ask him if he is on the side of the private insurance companies as opposed to ordinary people. What we have heard in this debate and from people across the country is that they want better access to GP services. They want the Minister of State to remove the cost barrier. They want her to make it free as promised, starting this year with under 12s and for the entire population by 2030. They do not want to wait weeks to access a service. We should increase capacity and the number of GPs. We have set out a detailed plan on how the Government can do that, and we urge it to implement this plan in full starting today. --- 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/2026-02-25/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:41+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-25