Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I take some of the points the Minister is making. Due to a family member being ill for some time, I have had occasion to go into one of our major hospitals every week, at least once a week, for about the past year. I can tell the Minister that the story I hear every week is the same, namely, understaffing, lack of resources, not enough people on the wards and, in some cases, outright chaos, despite the best efforts of healthcare workers. Let us not forget that some of the additional demands that necessitate the increases the Minister is talking about, setting aside the exceptions, which I accept exist, are caused by the fact we have an older population. This puts ever-growing pressure on the health service and it is just something that we have to factor in as being necessary. In addition, after Covid, we have learned that we need better health services and we need buffers. We cannot be operating at near maximum capacity, which we were going into the pandemic, but we are a long way from having the sort of capacity buffers that we need if we were to hit something else. I put that point to the Minister.

All of the healthcare workers say the issue is staff. Of course, one of the major difficulties in recruiting staff into the health service, and we could say the same about education and a whole number of key areas where there are deficits, is the cost of housing, which means young people are leaving.

I was in London a couple of times recently and I was shocked to meet young people in the way we used to in the late 1980s. It is the first time I have seen it in a decade. Loads of young Irish people are living in London, having left because they cannot afford to live here. Almost all of them are qualified in various things, with trades and university degrees. They are all living in London saying they do not really want to be there but they felt they had no choice because it is cheaper. It is telling us something if they think London is cheaper than here to find a place to live.

We have a problem that we have to solve and a large part of that is the provision of affordable accommodation. One thing the Minister should be doing with the additional money is making even more ambitious use of it to build up the public and affordable housing stock to keep here the people we desperately need for our public services. They are draining out. The more pressure that is put on them, such as the temporary recruitment moratorium, the more of them will leave. One of the things being said by the people out on the protest today was that if this continues more of them will leave. This is against a massively understaffed situation already.

Disability activists will protest outside Leinster House tomorrow. There is a new coalition of disability groups. As the Minister may know, the UN international day for persons with disabilities was on Sunday. People with disabilities and disability advocates are really annoyed that the Government is banging on about the UNCRPD and the obligations we all have under it while not wanting to ratify the optional protocol. More to the point of what we are speaking about here, disability is hived off as a minority thing to a particular Department rather than being across the board, which is really what the UNCRPD should be. When we speak about additional expenditure for the Department of disability and integration, because disability has moved there from the Department of Health, surely what we need is money across every Department to ensure we are actually capable of giving equality in every single facet of life and have the resources capable of doing this.

I will give a local example from my area. I received a phone call from a wheelchair user who is a big disability activist to speak about an occupational therapy service in the local health centre. People who need their wheelchair serviced or a replacement wheelchair had one hour each day, five days a week, when they could phone somebody and an occupational therapist would be at the other end of the phone to sort out getting the wheelchair serviced. Recently, this was cut back to three days a week. It is now available on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays instead of every day, Monday to Friday. People are raging about this and rightly so. If they do not have their wheelchairs it creates serious problems, as does not getting them serviced when needed. The point is they do not have the occupational therapists they need to provide this service. This is an indicator of what they are saying about the lack of disability funding resources and disability-related staffing. In this case it is local and linked to the council and the Department of Health. I have banged on too much but the Minister gets my points.