Health (Waiting Lists) Bill 2024: Second Stage [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2025-12-11 ============================================================ David Cullinane (SF), Waterford If I was in government and was handed a script like the one the Minister of State was expected to deliver this evening - I assume by officials in the Department, but I do not know who crafted the speech - I hope that I would say, "No thank you, I am not going to read that out." It was embarrassing in the context of the reasons given for opposing this Bill. It is embarrassing for one simple reason, namely it is what the Minister of State and the Government signed up to. It is what we all signed up to when we agreed Sláintecare. An Teachta Rice is right. It is alarming that the Government is clearly stating that it is walking away from a commitment given to put in place statutory waiting list targets and maximum waiting list times. The Minister of State is mixing up policy and policy targets, on the one hand, and statutory targets, on the other. That is the difference between what this Bill seeks to do and what he outlined. What we see routinely from this Government are HSE service plans. These are produced every year but are not worth the paper they are written on because the HSE does not have the capacity to meet any of the targets. Almost every target that is set is broken. The Minister of State cited all of the targets set out even in the most recent waiting list plan to reduce wait times in some areas by 50%. Nobody out there, not even the people who wrote the script for him, believe that is going to happen. All we have are these published fantasy targets. It is a case of "We will see what is going to happen, but we are not going to do anything and do not really care." That is what I hear from Government. Before I get into some of the process issues behind the Bill and the reasons I think the explanations the Minister of State gave are utter nonsense, I highlight the fact that I am also of the view that we will not reduce waiting lists until we put capacity into the system. We have to build the four elective hospitals. We have to deliver on the hospital beds. We have to deliver on the diagnostic capacity. We have to upgrade equipment. We need new equipment in some hospitals, and we need staff. We need to train more healthcare professionals to fill the gaps where there are staff shortages. All of those are obvious ingredients when it comes to reducing waiting lists and providing faster care. In the context of Sláintecare, it is understood that process is important. Setting targets is also important, however. I do not believe we will ever solve the problem in emergency departments and have a situation where people will not be left on trolleys if we do not adopt a zero-tolerance approach. That is precisely what happened in Waterford, where the hospital manager at the time said that one person on a hospital trolley was one too many and adopted a zero-tolerance approach as a result. He did not believe change would happen overnight, or in a week or a month. However, if we set it as a target, the entire system - the staff, consultants, nurses, healthcare assistants, radiographers and everybody working in hospitals and in other parts of the healthcare system which are crucial in the context of reducing crises in emergency departments and identifying what the capacity needs are - will be forced to get us to a point where we do not have patients on trolleys. That is precisely what happened and it would not have happened if a zero-tolerance approach had not been taken. It is the same with the maximum wait time targets. The reason Sláintecare set those targets was that it was believed, on the advice of the Department, the HSE and all the experts who came before the special Oireachtas committee that looked at Sláintecare, it was possible to do it. The purpose of setting a maximum wait time was to force the system to put the capacity in to meeting that objective. The Government is now walking away from that. The Minister of State shook his head earlier when he indicated it was not but clearly it is. The reason he gave for opposing this Bill was that the Government did not have to accept this because it was doing it anyway. It is not doing it. It does not have statutory targets. I do not know if the Minister of State could point to me where on the Statute Book the Government has ever legislated for the Sláintecare targets. I know it has not done so. Coming then to the community waiting lists, I find the Government's response on those even worse, and breathtaking in many ways. It is an acceptance of utter failure by the Government. It is really saying it cannot publish the community waiting list times through the NTPF, in the same way as the acute hospitals, because we are not up to that standard yet. What an appalling response and appalling situation for us to find ourselves in. We have children and adults on those waiting lists waiting for access to dentists, dietitians, speech and language therapists and all the other community waiting lists. We get those responses back through parliamentary questions. They may not be perfect, and I made that point earlier, but at least we get numbers. It is possible for Government to publish those waiting list times. If they are imperfect and need to be improved or brought up to a standard similar to those for the acute hospitals, that can happen over time and evolve. However, simply to say we are not doing it because we do not believe we can do it to the same standard as acute hospital waiting lists is not a satisfactory response. We have an entitlement to the highest levels of transparency. I imagine it frustrates patients that we spend tens of billions every year on health and yet there is basic information we cannot collate or publish. I will finish how I started. If I was in the Minister of State's shoes, I would have handed the speech back and said, "No thanks, I am not going to read that out" because it essentially tells the public the Government is again walking away from one of the key proposals and action points it had in accepting Sláintecare. That is regrettable. My party remains committed to Sláintecare and to the highest levels of transparency in the health service for waiting lists. We also remain committed to people getting timely, fast and rapid access to care, as best we can. This will not happen overnight and there is a lot to be done to get to a point where we can reach those targets. Unless we take targets seriously, however, which the Government is not doing based on the Minister of State's speech, and use those targets to mobilise and marshal the resources of the health service to meet them, patients will continue to wait. I gave the examples of patients waiting for cataract, hip and hernia operations, which are standard day-case procedures in most cases, but there are others, including cancer care, cardiac care and so on. I am disappointed the Minister of State is not accepting this Bill. I will take this up with the Minister for Health. --- 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/2025-12-11/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-11