Good Deputies.

The Taoiseach is losing the argument.

We are proud of them.

Hear, hear.

Last night, RTÉ broadcast an edition of "Prime Time" that dealt with the issue of older people who lost their lives in nursing homes. We heard harrowing accounts from relatives of the residents of a home in Cork who lost their loved ones without seeing them. Mams, dads, husbands and wives died, many of them on their own with nobody to hold their hands, while family members looked on through windows. Obviously, that was traumatic for all of the families involved. My party leader and I wrote to the Taoiseach a number…

I am sharing time with my colleagues. I commend the Regional Group for tabling this motion. We tabled a similar motion last night and the response from the Minister, which was a scripted speech on the motion, was nothing short of disgraceful. Rather than accepting the reality of the challenges that paramedics in the NAS and patients face, with lengthening wait times for ambulances as shown in the data presented to us by the HSE, the Minister spent most of his time attacking the Opposition and my party and seeking t…

This morning, the Irish Examiner reported that up to 6,000 patients in County Waterford and the south east are in a living nightmare due to an extraordinarily long wait for their cancer test results. At the end of last year, there was a backlog of more than 6,000 potentially cancerous tissue samples waiting to be processed in the histology department of University Hospital Waterford. This number was reduced over the past two months to 5,000 as of Monday but there are still significant delays, with some patients wai…

I spoke to hospital management early this morning to be assured that whatever can be done is being done. The manager I spoke to said the serious incident management team has been in place for some weeks. She also said the transfer of samples to other laboratories is not happening at the pace promised and that the hospital has directly asked the two CEOs of the hospital groups, because St. Luke's, Kilkenny, is in the Ireland East Hospital Group and University Hospital Waterford and Tipperary hospital are in the Sout…

The Taoiseach should speak for himself.

There are plenty of people behind the Taoiseach who would take the job.

I move: That Dáil Éireann: commends the tireless work of frontline paramedics and operational staff in dealing with increased demand without proportional resource increases; notes that: — 80 per cent of life-threatening incidents should be responded to by an ambulance within 19 minutes, as per the Health Service Executive's (HSE) own standards; — average ambulance response times have lengthened by 50 per cent since 2019, by an average of 9 minutes, going from 18 to nearly 27 minutes, and up to 33 minutes on average…

That is not true.

It takes a bit of a brass neck to deliver the speech that the Minister for Health delivered earlier today. It is so full of inaccuracies and mistruths, it is hard to know where to start. I will start with the first one, where he said that the Sinn Féin motion would have you believe that our NAS professionals are failing in their job. In fact, the very first line of our motion "commends the tireless work of front-line paramedics and operational staff in dealing with increased demand without proportional resource inc…

I welcome the ambassador from Ukraine. We stand with the people of Ukraine. I also welcome the other guests in the Visitors Gallery. I am sure the entire House will join with me in unreservedly condemning the attack on an off-duty police officer in Omagh last night. My thoughts are with the officer injured in the shooting and his family, who will be traumatised by this attack. It is an attack on the entire community and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. Anybody with information on this attack shoul…

The Tánaiste said that the waiting times at Cork University Hospital and University Hospital Limerick are a cause for concern. They are not just a cause for concern, they are completely unacceptable. What is happening is shocking and scandalous. I put it to the Tánaiste that, in his constituency, people over the age of 75 who deserve better and who should be treated with respect and dignity waited, on average, 40 hours for treatment in the month of December. That is a scandal. The Tánaiste referred to beds. Some 1,…

Say that to the Minister.

Yet the Government took them out.

Many homeowners are experiencing sharp and sudden hikes in interest rates. The vulture fund, Pepper, has warned borrowers it will hike interest rates again, with many now facing mortgage repayments which are as much as €3,500 higher than last year. It is now clear that the assurances made by Ministers that those whose mortgages were sold to vulture funds would be no worse off were false. In the months ahead, these homeowners will face further rate hikes and higher mortgage repayments. Fianna Fáil championed mortgag…

The first question relates to residents of long-term residential disability services who were wrongfully charged for their care. This is part of the long-stay care issue that was at the heart of a number of memos which were published in the Irish Daily Mail a number of weeks ago and have been discussed at the Committee of Public Accounts and the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health. What work are the Minister and his departmental officials doing to establish if additional residents of residential disability service…

The 2011 memo which was published identified 9,000 people with disabilities who may also have been wrongly charged with an estimated liability of €350 million. Yesterday at the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health, the Secretary General of the Department of Health said he has seen a database that underpins the figure of €350 million, which he believes may be too high as not all of those people may have had entitlement. However, he accepts that some people may have had an entitlement. The 2011 memo is quite explicit…