Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Minister put out a comforting narrative at the outset about the general situation in the health service but to my mind it would clash fairly strongly with the perceptions that people have about what is happening in the health service in general at present. Would people not be correct to be pretty sceptical? The GPs are protesting outside because we have a crisis in general practice. We have a national nurses strike over pay, recruitment and retention. We have a national ambulance strike which we do not seem interested in resolving. We have a desperate trolley crisis and hundreds of thousands of people on hospital waiting lists. We have a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, CAMHS, which is 50% understaffed and a major crisis in community mental health. We have a CervicalCheck scandal, a €600 million overrun in the health budget and the cherry on top, from a Fine Gael Government that prides itself on prudence and fiscal rectitude, we have a cost escalation for this project going from €400 million when Fine Gael came into power to €1.4 billion for the hospital itself, and €1.7 billion in total. At an elementary level, is it not a shambles, that this has happened collectively for the years of Fine Gael Government from the time of the then Minister, James Reilly through Deputy Leo Varadkar to the present Minister? That is not improvement. We are actually reaching the worst point of a crisis in the health service at just about every level. Is that not a reasonable comment, given what is going on? Is that not a reasonable perception that the public would have at present?