Dental Services
Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-25
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Linda Nelson Murray (FG), Industrial and Commercial Panel

I thank the Minister of State. I appreciate emergency care is provided to children up to 16 years of age but we should not be letting them get to the emergency care situation. The teeth of primary schoolchildren who cannot afford to go to a private dentist are not going to be good. I feel really privileged that I could afford to go to a dentist, but if my children had to wait until sixth class, they would have no back teeth. There would be no enamel. They would be so uncomfortable and it would be emergency procedure after emergency procedure. Parents do not want to see their kids going through that because they do not want them turned off dentists and do not want them going through that pain.
It is so important we get to the primary school age. If I take my own county of Meath, which seems to have been particularly hit, in quarter 4 of 2017, 9,400 children were seen in their school, but in quarter 4 of 2023, only 2,378 were seen. That is three quarters down in nine years. Counties Longford and Westmeath had a population of 142,000 people according to census 2022. They have 31 dentists contracted under the dental treatment services scheme, DTSS, but in Meath we only have 17 for a population of 240,000. Nationally we have a major problem but in County Meath we absolutely need a focus on public dentistry.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-25/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:41+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-25