General Practitioner Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-21
============================================================

Joe Neville (FG), Kildare North

I thank the Minister for her very positive reply. This has an impact especially in my constituency of Kildare North, where we see a huge need for more GPs, but I have also been very aware that it is not just commuter belt areas where we have this issue. There are also areas where there are rural sustainability challenges and indeed urban deprivation strategies. Analysis shows that it is in those three areas that we have the biggest issues. For the rural areas we have put in place a rural practice grant. For the deprived areas we have a deprivation grant. However, the one thing we have not really focused on as much is the need to help the GPs in the commuter belt. I look at the town of Maynooth. It had five GP practices 15 years ago. The population has expanded probably from about 11,000 to closer to 17,000. It now has only four GPs. That is why I am really focused on this for the commuter belt area. Maynooth is just a mirror image of what I see across the constituency.

---

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/2026-04-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:08+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-21