Colm Burke (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for the presentation. May I touch on one or two issues? First, additional funding was provided to the private nursing homes to deal with the pandemic. I did not see any figure for public nursing homes and community hospitals. I believe there are 119 of them. Could we have a breakdown of the additional funding that had to be made available, particularly to increase the level of care so the facilities could deal with the new demands and challenges posed by Covid.

Second, I want to touch on the expansion of home care. The pandemic has created new demands. As the Minister said, the number of people over 65 is going to continue to grow over the next ten years. The number is about 720,000 now and it will be 1 million by 2030. On the rolling out of additional home care supports and the regulation of the home care providers, what progress will be made during 2021?

The final point I want to touch on concerns Sláintecare, to which the Minister referred quite a bit. The Sláintecare team produced a report on the three elective hospitals for Cork, Galway and Dublin. It is a totally watered-down proposal. I am getting no response from anyone regarding where we are going on this. We put considerable money into new healthcare facilities in Dublin. The population of Cork has grown by 130,000 over recent years and it is a question of new hospital beds, yet a Sláintecare report is suggesting that Cork should have only a day facility, which could not cater for anyone with diabetes or other underlying conditions. Where are we going with this Sláintecare report? Where is there provision in the budget for 2021 to deal with these issues?