Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

In 2019, the figure for adverse incidents was 75,000 while in 2021, the figure was 105,000. Again, most of those adverse incidents are likely to have happened because doctors and nurses are under so much pressure because of the lack of staff in those systems. When Simon Harris was Minister for Health, he commissioned a report that showed there was a direct correlation between under-staffing on wards and adverse incidents.

This is a micro-example of what is happening in the HSE. Yesterday, management held a big staff meeting in Navan. It took all the leather chairs out of the accident and emergency department and left them up in the staff meeting. When there were 35 people waiting in the accident and emergency department after being triaged, they had nowhere to sit and sat on the ground for hours waiting to be dealt with. There is a complete chasm between senior management and people working on the front line.

When the Taoiseach compares and contrasts, he compares to worse years and worse countries. He is very able to do this and it is a good debating tactic in terms of brushing back criticism of Government action. If you look at all of the trends in key performance indicators in the health service, they have been going in the wrong direction over the past 15 years. Funding in the HSE should be on the basis of activity. Right now, lots of hospitals in this country have theatres that are closed for months and everybody gets paid the same amount. If we started to pay hospitals on the basis of the number of patients they consult with, treat or operate on and if there was a relationship between the funding of hospitals and their outputs, I imagine we would see improved productivity and outcomes for patients in the long run.

The next issue that concerns competency is migration. Many communities have dealt very well and very positively with people coming from war zones and places of violence in the past while for which we commend them. I am not speaking on that side of the debate. I want to look at the Government's response. A total of 85% of people who offered private accommodation to migrants from different countries were not activated. These are people who wanted to give homes to people coming to the country but many of them never got phone calls. In April, the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth identified 500 buildings that are suitable for people coming in from other countries but by December, only ten were in use. I tabled a parliamentary question to see how many buildings had been purchased by the Department to accommodate people coming here from other countries. As of early January, the figure was 31 but only one was in use. We had promises that modular homes would be up and running and providing accommodation for people in October and here we are in March. I do not think any of them is standing in any part of the country. These are outputs and targets created by the Government but they have been spectacularly missed on a regular basis. This is the competency issue that is at the heart of the inertia and bureaucratic mechanisms regarding not achieving the goals that are necessary to achieve to help people.

The average waiting time in 2022 for an application for asylum to be processed was 18 months. Eighteen months is not fair on the asylum seeker and it is not helpful to the system because the system must deal with larger numbers. According to a reply to parliamentary question I received, at the start of this year,14,000 people were still waiting for their applications to be processed. We want to run an efficient and humane system but those figures are pointing to an inefficient and inhumane system. Why is it that in respect of those six performance indicators, the Government's figures show they are wide of the mark?