David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I attended a conference on mental health a while back. I was struck by a presentation that was given by the CEO of an organisation involved in mental health, and I think it can relate to many of the national strategies. There was a slide in the presentation which showed a car that was being held up not by wheels, but by policy documents and plans. A large number of plans was holding up the car, but the car was not going anywhere. It strikes me that we are seeing a bit of this with national strategies. I will quote Ms Power’s own words back to her. She said: “Without proper funding, the national cancer strategy is a plan without action, and a plan without action is not a plan. It is just words.” It is so dispiriting to people when plans like this are announced and organisations such as the Irish Cancer Society are on steering committees, a lot of work goes into formulating the needs, the demands, the services that are required, the planning that is required, such as workforce planning, service provision, increased healthcare capacity and the components of the plan, and then the funding does not come. I want to ask Ms Power’s view on this because it is something I have been saying for some time. There are areas in which it will be very easy to introduce multi-annual funding and healthcare, but there may be other areas where it might be more difficult. Yet, it certainly strikes me that when it comes to national strategies, we should be setting out multi-annual funding for the lifetime of a strategy.

Is this something the Irish Cancer Society supports and how important would that be? We will raise this with the HSE but it strikes me that when we have start-stop-start funding then one cannot plan. I do not know how organisations can plan like this. We see this happening also with community groups and in lots of other areas where it can be very difficult. If an organisation is waiting for an announcement to come for extra funding and it may or may not come, and as happened in this case it did not come in five of the seven years, then organisations cannot plan. What is the Irish Cancer Society's overall view of multi-annual funding?