I am proud of the wonderful staff we have in our health services. Over recent months, as they battled through Covid, we all gave them a clap on the back and commended their heroics, and rightly so. I have met many of them and can tell the Minister they are hungry for change in healthcare. They want things to be different. They want the tools to do the job. They do not want any more claps on the back from politicians. They want us to do our job, which is to provide the resources to the public system to enable them t…

The people at the top who run the health services get mega salaries that are multiples of what anybody in this Chamber will get, yet we do not have accountability or transparency. At the top of the health services targets set are missed over and over again and it permeates right down to local hospitals where we can again say there are major problems in some hospitals. In some cases, I have to say it is simply bad management. If I were the Minister for Health, I would of course put capacity into hospitals where it i…

We do not control any council.

Hear, hear.

I hope she will be in your place soon enough.

Hear, hear.

I welcome the Bill and commend an Teachta Tóibín on bringing it forward. My party has supported free car parking in public hospitals for many years. In fact, in the North, Sinn Féin introduced a similar Bill in the Assembly recently that seeks to abolish similar charges. I would do the same if I were the Minister for Health or if Sinn Féin was in government in this State. We must decide whether we will agree to the principle of free car parking in hospitals and move away from it being a revenue raiser for hospitals…

May we note for the record that Sinn Féin is the only party here to support Deputy Tóibín, apart from the Minister of State of course?

Hear, hear.

From his email. He said it himself. I will send it to the Taoiseach.

I welcome the opportunity to speak on what is important legislation. As we know, whistleblowing is an essential mechanism for exposing and stopping wrongdoing. We should do everything we possibly can to protect whistleblowers. As the health spokesperson for my party, I have seen far too many whistleblowers in the area of health come forward to expose wrongdoing. They have exposed horrific abuse and neglect, such as what happened in the context of CAMHS in Kerry in recent times. There have been so many examples of w…

I think we all accept that waiting lists are dangerously high. At the weekend, figures from the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, showed almost 900,000 people are on some form of health waiting list. More than 600,000 people are waiting for a hospital appointment, of whom 165,000, including 25,000 children, have been waiting longer than 18 months to see a hospital consultant. We are moving in the wrong direction. I ask the Minister to outline his strategy to tackle, once and for all, these dangerously high wa…

The problem is that all sorts of promises have been made in the past to deal with waiting lists. When the HSE was established and in 2005, the Taoiseach at the time stated he would eliminate waiting lists. In 2015, the Tánaiste, as the then Minister for Health, said that by the summer of 2015 under his watch no patient would wait longer than 18 months. In 2017, the then Minister for Health, Deputy Simon Harris, said he would halve the time people were waiting for more than 18 months. What has happened? The waiting …

The Minister has to understand what causes the problem with waiting lists. It is the same thing that causes the problem in our emergency departments. We do not have enough admission beds in hospitals. Two years ago, in budget 2021, the Minister committed to bring 1,147 additional in-patient acute beds into the system. Some 400 of those have not yet been delivered. Hospitals do not have the beds to admit patients in the numbers they need. That creates problems in our emergency departments. We do not have the enhance…

I spoke earlier about the crisis we have in GP capacity. There are so many crises in health and I think the Minister will accept we have a real problem in this State. I am getting calls from people who are telling me that for the first time, they are having real difficulties getting an appointment to see a GP. It is not just Covid-related. It is a problem in rural areas but also in parts of Dublin as well. Many people cannot get registered with a GP. The HSE has said there is a deficit of up to 1,600 GPs. That is e…

The Minister's response sets out the scale of the challenge because we are talking about 233 training places. I engaged with the ICGP on this and approximately 30 places over the past two years were not available to allow some of those training places to be taken up. That is one of the problems. We need 2,100 GPs over the next five years to simply stand still. That is on a no-change basis. We are all committed to universal GP access, but we are only training 233 people. Not all of them will go into the public syste…

The example the Minister gave of a GP in Waterford is very important, and he has listened to what she had to say, but he is the Minister and he can effect change. If I was in his shoes, I would establish a working group on the future of general practice and I would look at a new model of GP and primary care, including the option of directly hired GPs, if that is what we need to do. We need a new GMS contract. The Minister is right that many GPs who are coming out of training all of a sudden find they are entreprene…

I will share time with my colleagues, Deputies Tully, Ward, Martin Kenny and Gould. I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle and Minister of State. I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this important Bill, which Sinn Féin will not oppose. It gives effect to the Government decision to transfer responsibility for specialist community-based disability services from the Minister for Health to the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. We can now add "disability" to that Long Title. The Bill, w…

I am sharing time with several of my colleagues. I thank the Social Democrats and An Teachta Shortall for bringing forward this important motion. Obviously, Sinn Féin will be supporting it and we will continue to advocate for the removal of hospital inpatient charges, car parking charges and other taxes on being sick on a phased basis, balancing medical and financial need. My party believes in a single-tier universal healthcare system that delivers care when and where it is needed on the basis of need and not the a…

She is asking the Taoiseach that.