David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Yet all of this was already provided for in the announcement made on budget day. That concerns me, because the Minister said earlier that one of the priorities must be access. When we look at the data relating to waiting lists, it is frightening when we see the number of people who are waiting for healthcare. From looking at the figures, sometimes there is an over-reliance or focus on what is happening on the acute side.

It is very important. We have nearly 898,000 on some form of health waiting list when we look at the totality, but the active acute waiting list is about 703,000, which is still huge. There is also the length of time people are waiting. We have nearly 165,000 patients waiting over 18 months on some form of outpatient waiting list. Separate from that, we have 226,000 people waiting for a diagnostic scan, which is a huge number. Although I do not have time, I could talk to the Minister about my own family members and the constituents I have met who have had to go private because they simply could not wait for a diagnosis from the public system. That is a huge number of people on top of the almost 900,000 people waiting for access to a consultant or waiting for treatment.

We then go into the community, where this information is not published. We can go onto the National Treatment Purchase Fund website and we will get all the information we want on the acute side but we cannot get access to similar information publicly for community or for diagnostics. Over a long period of putting in parliamentary questions and getting the full breakdown across home help, orthodontics, psychology, counselling, CAMHS, speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, podiatry, ophthalmology, audiology and dietetics, I found that some 225,000 people are on waiting lists in the community.

That is almost 900,000 on the acute side, 226,000 waiting for a diagnostic assessment and 225,000 on a community waiting list, yet in this package that the Minister will announce tomorrow, not one single cent is additional funding. It is all funding already provided, with some of it going to the National Treatment Purchase Fund, and we will have to see what that €200 million actually does. I have seen it reported that the Minister is setting very ambitious targets. Does he believe there is any chance of achieving those targets given there is not a cent of additional funding beyond what was provided and given the scale of the waiting lists and the number of people waiting, but also the length of time they are waiting?