Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I sincerely thank the Technical Group for time to contribute to the debate. As the previous Deputy said, when one looks around the Chamber, it is a fairly lonesome sight. I very much respect the presence of the honourable Members of the Others, so-called, who were here to say their piece on this important subject. I respect their integrity and the honourable position they have taken. They were elected under the flag of a political party but they would not be bound by that or held back in their conviction and in what they believed in their hearts to be right and wrong. I appreciate and respect their views and how forthright they were in making the sacrifice they had to make to stand up and say what they believed was right or wrong. Where are the other Others? Where are the people who went before the electorate and said Fianna Fáil had run the country into the ground? They condemned and they castigated.

I was not a Member at the time but I was not in another world. I recall what the Taoiseach said when he was leader of the Opposition and what the Minister for Health said when he attacked his predecessor. He said she was hiding behind the HSE every day and night. When Opposition Members question him now, he hides behind the HSE. God knows he is substantial enough that he should be able to stand up for himself, not to mind hiding behind anybody, but, unfortunately, he is responsible for presiding over a disastrous set of circumstances that have led us to this point. The one thing elderly people, whom we respect, hold dear in our beautiful, small country is their medical card. It did not fall into their laps; they earned it. They are our parents and grandparents who worked hard,

The Government parties had the cheek to say this change would save more than €100 million but it would not hurt or affect anybody. They said they would make these massive savings but they would not cut anything when we all knew a secret decision had been taken earlier this year by them to cut more than 40,000 medical cards. This will have a catastrophic effect on people who are vulnerable because they are living on low incomes and need every penny they have.

I have to look to my colleagues in County Kerry whom I competed against to get into the House. Where are they now? They went before the people of County Kerry and made serious promises. Where are they tonight? They will run into the House later when the division bells ring and they will vote to hurt the very people who voted for them. Fine Gael and the Labour Party secured a substantial vote, and later they will hit the very people who voted for them. If they think the electorate will forget this, they will have another think coming. The electorate will wait and bide its time and the people will have their say, in the same way as the yes men who will run into the House shortly to vote to hurt and affect these respectable people.

Those respectable people will remember what was done to them. When Fine Gael and the Labour Party rang the buzzers on the doors a couple of years ago, the welcome they got was very warm. They said they would have to get rid of Fianna Fáil and they promised they would do everything better. The people will remember what better is. Better is hurting our elderly people and taking away their medical cards.

I received a heartbreaking telephone call before I came into the Chamber from the mother of a five and a half year old boy. Yesterday morning when she gave him a cuddle, she hurt him when she put her arms around him because he is waiting for a procedure to be carried out in the children's hospital in Crumlin. Unfortunately, the nuclear X-ray machine will be out of use during January and it is in limited use at the moment. I was so upset after the telephone call that I telephoned Great Ormond Street Hospital in London to see how much it would cost for the X-ray and the procedure required to be done privately there. The parents do not have the money to pay for it but I would undertake to fund-raise for this operation.

Is it not some indictment of where we are today in terms of health care when a five and a half year old child is in pain and is sore? I cannot get it out of my head. The only alternative I can see to help this child in the immediate future is to have the X-ray and the procedure done privately in England. This is very upsetting. If it is upsetting for me, can one imagine how upsetting it is for the parents of that child who is sore and in need of a procedure which cannot be done because of cutbacks?

For the Minister to continuously hide behind the HSE is upsetting because the Government promised so much. Its members did not need to make the massive promises they made to get into power. If the members of the Government had half a brain in their heads, which I am sure they have somewhere, they would have known they would get elected. They did not need to make all these promises but they did regardless. It was like the Taoiseach saying in an after dinner speech that he wanted to do away the Seanad in case it would get a couple of more votes for him, although knowing in his heart and soul he did not need to do that. He got a fair kick for that. It is the first of many kicks he will get and it will go on for a long time. I do not know how to express my opinion of the Government given what it is doing, but it will be remembered forever.

The cut to the telephone allowance will cost the State money. People's pendants are connected to the telephone. If somebody who has done away with the landline falls in his or her house, he or she will not have that backup service. A person might have a small incident in his or her house but by not being able to contact somebody, the situation could be fatal or the person could finish up in hospital for a prolonged period, perhaps with a broken hip or some other such misfortune. If that happens, it will cost the State a lot more money, so it will not save money by doing away with the telephone allowance.

I refer to the ambulance service and centralising the emergency call centre in Townsend Street in Dublin. That facility is not fit for purpose because it is a fire station to which minor changes were made. All of a sudden somebody decided it would be a great idea to centralise our emergency call centre. Since that happened, lives have been lost because under the previous system, people knew localities. We had a situation in County Kerry where an ambulance was called to an address in Tralee but it ended up at the same address in Cork, 60 miles away. These are the types of stupid decisions over which the Government is presiding, things which are not saving money but are leading to situations where people do not have the same delivery of service or the same confidence in the service. For anybody telephoning 999 now, it is a chance in a million that one might be seen afterwards. One might say that is an exaggeration but I could go through the mishaps, cock-ups and mistakes which have been made since the call-out centre was centralised in Dublin.

We can see what happened with our community welfare officers and centralising the processing of medical cards. I very much appreciate the work being done by the people in the centralised centre for medical cards. Those people are doing their best because this was thrown at them and it is not their fault. The Government has created a disconnect between the people looking for a medical card, the community welfare officer who might have been dealing with the people, and the people in the locality processing the applications who had local knowledge and could telephone the community welfare officer to ask about the situation in a particular household. That has all been done away with. The Government has created a complete disconnect between the person looking for a medical card and the people adjudicating on whether the person should get a card.

Another awful dirty trick which I would like to highlight concerns medical evidence. I mentioned this in the audiovisual room a number of months ago when people from the Department gave a presentation. Again, I do not blame the people in the Department who are dealing with the deck of cards the Government gives them. When applying for a medical card, disability allowance, illness benefit or any such scheme, one is asked to give medical evidence from one's doctor, which is clearly stated on many documents. Every public representative knows that if one gives medical evidence from a doctor, one will be refused. The reply one will get is that, based on the medical evidence submitted, one is being refused because the HSE does not believe the medical evidence is good enough. What it is saying is that one should have a report from a consultant, but it does not tell one that because the Government wants applications for medical cards, disability allowance and illness benefit to be refused. This is a magic formula when it comes to issuing refusals because it catches an awful lot of people out.

A person who may be elderly or ill might not be under the care of a consultant but will get a letter from the doctor which he or she will think is the best he or she can give. If that person is refused on the basis of the medical evidence, he or she will ask what other evidence he or she can get. If he or she is not under the care of a consultant, he or she will not go to one because it will entail spending €150 or €250. A person applying for one of those schemes is looking for money and not to spend it because he or she does not have it to spend.

When the presentation was being given in the audiovisual room, I asked the following simple question. Why is it that the HSE does not tell people? Why does the Minister of State, Deputy White, not direct the people who are dealing with these schemes to state clearly that the HSE does not accept doctors' reports when it comes to applying for medical cards, disability allowance or any of those schemes? Just in case I was wrong, I asked many of my colleagues if they were having the same experiences, and they were. Besides being appointed a Minister of State, Deputy White was elected to the House, which means he has an electorate behind him and people are coming to him with their problems. The funny thing is that he knows everything I am saying is the truth and that I am right.

He knows that the HSE will not accept the evidence of doctors any more. It is an absolute no-no the minute it is seen. The doctor's report might say the applicant in question is under the care of a certain consultant, but that will not be enough. The report has to come from the consultant.

I can prove that what I am saying is correct. I deal with an awful lot of people whose applications have been refused. I tell every one of them to go away and get the evidence from a consultant. When they get it, we send it in not as an appeal but as a request for a review. We are successful in the majority of those instances. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. When I follow what I am told is the correct procedure, it works. That is the proof. I am just one of 166 representatives in this House. I am sure everybody else has the same experience, regardless of whether the Minister of State wants to admit it. Maybe he cannot do so in his position as Minister of State. He might feel his job is to say I am wrong even though he knows I am right. He is shaking his head. I will be delighted to hear what he will say.

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