Mr. Paul Reid:

Before Professor MacLachlan comes in, I would like to come in on Senator Ruane’s point, which was on some of the inequities in our services. There is no doubt that across the healthcare service there are huge inequities, including for people from working class and disadvantaged areas. I come from Finglas west. I grew up seeing disadvantage in access to healthcare. It still exists. It breaks my heart that it exists. Certainly, the driver of Progressing Disability Services for Children and Young People, PDS, was to try to get that balance.

In their experience of PDS, some people have found that they have lost some aspects of services. The driver was to try to rebalance and provide services for those who have them. I think 643,000 people, or 13.5% of the population, indicated in the last census that they have an illness that would indicate a disability. That is a significant number. One will find that a significant proportion of that figure may not even be identified, in areas such as Senator Ruane expressed. We saw this during Covid-19 in vaccinations programmes and who was coming through. This was not because they did not want a vaccination, but it was an issue of awareness. High presentations of Covid-19 illness was in areas of high disadvantage. These were primarily in urban centres, as well as in areas of high disadvantage across the country. There are inequities. As the CEO, I am passionate about this. Government policy is there to give equal access to services. It is a relentless policy. I know when we are failing. Sometimes I do not know when we are failing, because we do not see it.