Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

Very well. The issue is that the Irish Family Planning Association, IFPA, has been obliged to suspend all its family planning services for the remainder of the year. The Minister of State will be aware the Irish Family Planning Association provides a national service to medical card holders and the reason it has been obliged to suspend its service for the final quarter of the year is that the Department of Health and Children has failed to provide the necessary funding. Moreover, that Department has failed to increase the level of funding for the past two years.

No family planning services will be available as a result of the failure to provide an increase in funding. Second, the number of medical cards has increased substantially. An additional 78,000 medical cards, as well as a number of GP-only cards, have been granted to citizens in the past 12 months. When the quantity of medical cards increases, the service providers should have ample funds to deal with the services required by such medical card holders. However, exactly the same sum of money has been made available. The annual allocation from the HSE to the IFPA is a meagre €290,000, which has not increased for the past couple of years. As the IFPA is a not-for-profit charity organisation, it has no means of fundraising and must bear any over-expenditure on its annual allocation itself. At present, it is €60,000 over budget and has no means of paying off that money. It now faces a bleak winter of being obliged to turn away medical card holders. It is a catch-22 situation.

The IFPA provides its services to the most vulnerable people in Ireland, such as young people, particularly in respect of teenage pregnancies, the unemployed, people with a disability, minority groups, ethnic women, single parents and those on low incomes. Such services are essential in reducing the numbers of unwanted and unplanned pregnancies and in providing women with family planning and primary health care. The services are provided on a national basis and their suspension will result in many women being unable to access family planning services for the next three months.

Cost-effective analyses indicate that for every euro spent on providing family planning services, more than four euro is saved on maternity services. The experience of the IFPA is typical of the dysfunctional manner in which the Government goes about its business. It makes a Cabinet decision to increase the number of medical cards but expects the service providers to operate with the same budget and staff numbers.

The budget will be announced next Tuesday and the budget increase must reflect the rising cost of providing comprehensive family planning services, the recent increase in the number of medical card holders and the increase in annual inflation rates. Something must be done immediately to ensure the HSE will increase the IFPA's budget in order that the necessary services and care will be provided for women and young people with medical cards between now and the year's end.

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