Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-11
============================================================

Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

The Minister's commitment to public healthcare is somewhat undermined by the fact that private suites are being built in the new national children's hospital right now - more inequality literally being built into the system even though private care in public hospitals is meant to be expiring.
I will ask again whether the Minister agrees that this report needs to be published. People have the right to see these figures which show the reality of the horrific effect of having private for-profit healthcare happening within our health system. What it means is worse health outcomes, longer times on waiting lists - sometimes in agony - and having poor outcomes at the end of it for kids whose parents do not have the money to have private healthcare. Is that okay? Is it okay that if you have private healthcare, you get to wait a lot less than if you have public healthcare? These are children. These are children who do not even make the choice about whether they have private healthcare or not.
Does the Minister agree that all children need to be treated equally, regardless of their health insurance status? Does he agree the report needs to be published? Does he agree that it is time to wipe private healthcare out of CHI and the whole public hospital system?

---

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