General Practitioner Services Dail Éireann — 2026-03-05 ============================================================ Martin Daly (FF), Roscommon-Galway I acknowledge the investment of the State in general practitioner services over the past number of years. I think the Minister would recognise that with our growing population - 90,000 a year - the increased expectation and sophistication in what they want from a functioning health service has increased. We are not accelerating the capacity at the rate we are going to have to. We are talking about having 6,000 GPs in 15 years' time in order to meet that demand. We have 4,200 GPs who are registered as GPs but they are not whole-time equivalents. Many of them are in part-time practice. That is just the changing way people and younger doctors work. We need to find a way of getting the full contribution from GP training, in that the State has invested huge amounts of money to get them into general practitioner services in the country, so that it can be sustainable into the future. --- 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/2026-03-05/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:44+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-03-05