Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry South, Independent)

I thank Deputy Kelleher for sharing his time with me. I thank the Minister and the Minister of State for being present.

The Minister said that he feels he is driving with the headlights on and that we are no longer driving in the dark. He should say that to the people in Cahersiveen who have lost their ambulance service during the hours from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. The people there will not have an ambulance service during those hours, they will not have headlights and they will be in the dark. This region is like no other in terms of the vastness of the area the ambulance service covers. I appreciate what Deputy Twomey stated about a first responder service and he is correct that we will have a first responder service. The Minister should note that during the hours the ambulance service will not be available in Cahersiveen, if an accident or an incident occurs or a person becomes ill on Valentia Island, Ballinskelligs, The Glen or Portmagee, the nearest ambulance base will be in Kenmare, Killarney or Tralee. The quickest time an ambulance can travel that journey is an hour and 45 minutes. The first responder will go out and, one hopes, stabilise the patient, but it will take the ambulance an hour and 45 minutes to arrive on the scene of whatever has happened. That cannot be right. The Minister's solutions are not applicable to the entire country because of the nature of the geography of the area. The Minister is right in his praise of the on-duty versus the on-call service for some cases but he is blatantly wrong in regard to other cases. This is a case in point where we should retain our ambulance service at night in Cahersiveen. We certainly do not want to see it suspended.

I support the motion and thank the Technical Group for bringing it forward. The dental clinics in Kenmare are under threat. We have already lost the one in Dingle. The Sláinte na Gaeltachta group would not be long telling the Minister what they think of the health service in that at a time when we have a new hospital in Dingle, we are losing our dental clinic which means that the people living in the Dingle Peninsula will have to travel to Tralee, as will the people in Kenmare and Cahersiveen. That is wrong because the distance people have to travel for treatment is ridiculous.

We are losing our call centre in Tralee and in Cork because the service is being centralised in Dublin. We got a bad enough fright when we saw what happened to the processing of medical cards once that service was moved from Tralee.

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