Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for their attendance. More than 1 million people in Ireland are waiting for care. Nothing like it has ever been seen here and nothing like it exists anywhere else in the developed world. More than 100,000 men, women and children have been waiting more for than a year and a half just to see a consultant. Children have been waiting for years for surgery, including some with scoliosis, as Dr. O'Hanlon noted, whose spines are curving to almost 90°, something that does not happen in any other European country. Elderly men and women must wait for days on trolleys in accident and emergency, while there are unsafe staffing levels in various specialties, as mentioned in our guests' opening statements. There are hundreds of unfilled posts and we have the lowest level of consultants and the longest waiting lists anywhere in Europe. There are non-specialists in specialist roles and doctors are leaving medicine in record numbers. Agency costs have shot up more by more than €60 million in recent years and national care programmes, including for cancer and maternity care, are at risk. The national children's hospital's satellite could not even fill its posts and as a result operates on less than it was meant to. Pay inequality for new entrants has been identified and accepted across parties, by the Opposition and the Government, and has been championed and pushed by the medical community for a long time.

Given all of these crises in healthcare that leave men, women and children waiting, suffering, deteriorating and dying, and given the relatively low cost of fixing this bloody thing, why is the Government steadfastly refusing to do so or even to meet representatives of the consultants to talk about it?