Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-06-11 ============================================================ Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West The greed of Rotunda Hospital consultants on public-only contracts trying to get a way with still treating private patients in public hospitals has been front-page news all week. The Minister for Health has said she believes "in equality for every baby being born". The idea that some mothers and babies should get better care because of having more money is absolutely abhorrent but the question is: should that equality for babies stop the moment that they leave the maternity hospital? There is an unpublished report by EY into Children's Health Ireland, CHI, which shows that is exactly what is happening. It shows that children whose parents cannot afford health insurance, that is, approximately half of all children in this country, are being forced to wait much, much longer for essential surgery. Hospital consultants are prioritising private patients over those on public lists. It shows that children who need urology surgery are waiting up to a year longer if they do not have private health insurance. Kids who need time-sensitive spinal surgery are waiting more than six months longer because their little bodies are less profitable to operate on. I will give the Minister some examples from the report. Urology consultant 2 in this sample has 20 public child patients. The average waiting time for surgery in public is 12.4 months. For ten private patients the average waiting time is 1.84 months. For consultant 5, in orthopaedics, the average waiting time in public is 8.7 months while the average waiting time in private is two months. That is pretty much across the board in terms of a massive discrepancy of waiting time in public versus waiting time for private. Everyone pretends that discrimination between private and public patients has no impact on safety or patient care but the review shows that to be untrue. Let me quote from it: "For Spinal patients, only 41% (9 out of 22) were treated within the Clinical Recommended Timeframes ... meaning 59% faced delays, sometimes for several months. Delays happened for both urgent and less urgent cases ... with a median delay of 143 days". We all remember poor Harvey Morrison Sherratt suffering in agony on a waiting list. In urology, "Of the 73 patients reviewed ... (41%) were treated outside the Clinical Recommended Timeframes ... The median delay was 152 days". There was one case where a child waited seven years for routine surgery. The report points out that children may wait longer than clinically recommended for assessment, investigation or treatment, with potential consequences for clinical outcomes, disease progression and quality of life. So much for cherishing all the children of the nation equally. Does the Minister agree that this is utterly horrendous and that all children should get equal access to healthcare? Does he agree that this report needs to be published immediately? Does he agree that just as private healthcare has no place in the Rotunda, it should have no place in Children's Health Ireland either? --- 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/2026-06-11/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:05+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-11