Health Services Dail Éireann — 2026-06-09 ============================================================ Mary Butler (FF), Waterford I thank Deputy Murphy for raising this very important issue. I am taking this Topical Issue on behalf of the Minister of State with responsibility for older people and housing, Deputy Kieran O'Donnell, who sends his apologies for not being able to be here tonight. The Deputy is quite right. I was a Minister of State in the previous Dáil for four and a half years, and one of the areas where we made a lot of progress was dementia. Every day in Ireland, there are 30 new cases of dementia. There were 30 yesterday, there are 30 today and there will be another 30 tomorrow. I was delighted to welcome the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, to Cappoquin in Waterford last Friday, where we opened a new dementia day service. It is something I worked on while I was in the role and it was great to get it over the line, because bringing services to people in the community, especially those with dementia, is really important. You can live well with dementia in your community with the correct wraparound supports of home care, day care, meals on wheels and the like of the memory clinics. When I was asked to take this Topical Issue debate tonight, I was disappointed to hear that one of the 25 memory clinics that I worked so hard to open across the country after Covid had been "paused". I do not like seeing that word at all. Memory clinics are so important. They are a specialist service to support people with memory loss, changes in cognitive formation or dementia. As the Deputy knows, it is located in St. Patrick's Hospital in Cashel in south Tipperary. I appreciate the impact that this is having on people who are awaiting dementia services. The HSE has advised me that the memory clinic in Cashel has been paused since January this year due to staffing and resourcing issues. I have spoken to the integrated healthcare area manager for south Tipperary this evening. I rang her and she assured me that the HSE was working both locally and nationally to resume the clinic as soon as possible. I am very conscious of the waiting list that the Deputy called out of 450 patients, 168 of whom have had the initial appointment. That is a significant waiting list. Currently, people are referred to the memory clinic either by their general practitioner or through acute hospitals or community specialist teams. Increasing service demand, combined with staffing challenges, has led to longer waiting lists in the memory clinic, as the Deputy alluded to. The HSE has approved the appointment of a full-time administrative post to support the current clinical administrative systems and allow for their further development. In addition, the current clinic staff are exploring new ways of working to address the waiting lists and resume the provision of a memory clinic service in south Tipperary. As the Deputy quite rightly said, the programme for Government includes a commitment to roll out more memory assessment and support services. I had the honour of being able to write that into the programme for Government. I feel strongly about dementia supports, regardless of where people live. I am disappointed to see that this is the current situation. I have been told that referrals can be made to the south Tipperary integrated care programme for older persons, ICPOP, team in Thurles, which provides specialist secondary care for people with cognitive decline, falls and frailty. I am conscious that the current situation in south Tipperary is difficult. I will give the Deputy a commitment tonight. I have already spoken to the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell's office this evening. We will follow this up rigorously because it is really important. We came from a situation where we did not have many dementia supports. We have 25 memory clinics open. They are vital, the length and breadth of the country. I will work with the Deputy and the Minister of State with responsibility for older people to make sure that we get this up and running again. --- 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/2026-06-09/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:05+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-09