No, that is not what it says. The Minister did not read it.

Read the whole sentence.

No. Do not be inaccurate, Minister.

The Minister's head is in the sand.

The Minister's contribution was disingenuous in the first instance. It was disappointing to many providers who are listening, and not just those in the Public Gallery, but many who are depending on the Government to act and to deal with the very real crisis that many of them face. It was also unnecessarily hostile in places given the motion does not criticise the Government at all and was, in fact, an earnest attempt on our part to ask and, indeed, to put pressure, rightly, on the Government to act to ensure sustai…

Let us look at next year's budget to see what will be in it because there was absolutely nothing in the Minister's budget.

Had the Government implemented our budget across healthcare, we would be in a much better place than we are now.

The people listening to this know that the Minister has absolutely failed this sector, not just last year but over successive Governments which created the crisis that we are in today. He needs to take his head out of the sand, deal with it today, deal with it quickly and deal with urgently. If he does not, more will close and he and the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, will have to deal with the reality and the consequences of that which should not happen. It is in his gift to deal with it and he should deal with…

I do not think the Taoiseach has been briefed. This will come back to haunt the Government.

I am sharing time with colleagues. I welcome the legislation and the debate today. We are broadly supportive of this Bill but we will bring forward some amendments on Committee Stage which I will discuss later. The Bill is a very important and long overdue public health measure. It was needed years ago when vaping was a new technology and before it was heavily and aggressively marketed towards young people. The health committee completed pre-legislative scrutiny of the proposals in this Bill last July. The evidence…

There has been much discussion on the air waves over the last number of weeks about a seven-day rostering service across our health services and, obviously, that is ideally something we would all want to get to. I tabled this question to give the Minister an opportunity to set out his perspective on this. What plans are in place? What talks and negotiations with representative bodies have or will take place? Could the Minister set out his views on how this can be made happen?

As I said, it is a laudable objective and one I support. Obviously, there must be dialogue and buy-in from healthcare staff. We need to recruit as many healthcare professionals as we possibly can. Even though additional numbers have come into the health service, the State has not achieved the recruitment targets we set ourselves with regard to the big numbers we need. Obviously, therefore, there are recruitment and retention issues. I see huge benefit in this with regard not just to acute hospitals but what is happ…

There are a number of options to get where we want to get to. I know that a call has been put out for people voluntarily to take up rosters at weekends. Obviously, that is something people may or may not do. The Minister pointed to Waterford and other hospitals that have done this. The former manager of the hospital in Waterford is now head of community services and is trying to bring the same level of energy into those community services that was brought into addressing problems at University Hospital Waterford. T…

Is that Mr. Gerry O'Dwyer?

In the first quarter of this year, people waited on average 11.7 hours in emergency departments for access to a bed. Unfortunately, people over the age of 75 waited on average 13.8 hours. For children, the average waiting time was 13.3 hours. We are hearing horror stories, to be frank, every day of every week about older people and children being left to wait even longer than those averages. Will the Minister tell us what more can and will be done to ensure we deal with the crisis in far too many emergency departme…

Like the housing crisis, we debate the trolley crisis time and again in this Chamber. We want to get to a point where we deal with it comprehensively but it seems to be getting worse. As the Minister said, it is now a year-round problem. The figures for the waiting times for those on hospital trolleys, which are presented to us every day of every week by the INMO, are exceptionally high. The waiting times are far too high. We need to do a lot of things. The seven-day rostering will absolutely help but there is also…

The patterns in the rest of Europe do not match with what is happening here in all areas. There is no good reason so many people are on trolleys if one hospital can arrive at a position where people are not on trolleys. Waterford is a very busy hospital serving a population of nearly 500,000. It has additional pressures now because of what happened in Wexford. If it can be done in one hospital, surely it can be done in others. Undoubtedly, there are capacity issues in other hospitals. We will get a chance to talk t…

Hear, hear.

They have gone up.

I move: That Dáil Éireann: notes that: - respite and short break services play an essential role in supporting family carers and people with disabilities, yet three quarters of families get no respite at all; - there is a significant level of unmet need in terms of respite care, with less than 5,200 people receiving a respite service in 2022, despite there being an estimated 20,000 people or more with intellectual disabilities, physical and sensory disabilities, and autism living with family; - less people received…