Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The slogan was "Every little cut hurts". It is very clear that the slogan has borne fruit because there are many people hurting from the little cuts and the big cuts that have been introduced by the Government and the previous Government. We know that €30 billion has been taken out of the economy over the past six years. We debated last year’s budget in the autumn of last year which included a figure of €130 million for what were called "probity measures". They were medical card cuts. Yet we hear the backbenchers and we will hear the Ministers say there is no such policy in place. We heard the Chair of the Joint Committee on Health and Children talk about the heart-breaking stories of those who were just above the eligibility threshold but the message to them was to suck it up because it is not a policy issue, it is a systems issue. Staff should just be nicer to people when they tell them they fail to meet the guidelines in terms of eligibility for a medical card or in cases when a card is being reviewed and one is no longer entitled to one. The message from the Government is to suck it up because it is very clear it is not taking the blame. The blame lies with the civil servants and public sector workers who are not nice enough to those who apply for medical cards or have their cards reviewed.

The Minister has a new language to describe the situation. He used to speak about medical cards being renewed but now they are reviewed. In the real world everybody knows what is happening. Everybody knows that it is a real and vicious cut to the eligibility of medical cards. In my office in Donegal, Gweedore and Ballybofey every single week, a number of medical card issues present. The cases relate to both old people and young people. When the Government initiated a whole-scale review of medical cards, streams of people came to my offices. Elderly people broke down in tears in front of staff in the office because of the fear they would lose their medical cards. Not all of them did but some of them did. They are people who built the health service, who contributed to running the country, who kept this country alive in very difficult times and the Government has abandoned them in their hour of need.

As other speakers stated, there are many heartbreaking stories which would bring us to tears. The Minister wants his own Deputies to give him a list of hard cases, but they are to be found in every village and parish throughout the State. The Government needs to accept there has been a change in policy and a targeting of the elderly and the weakest in society. The Minister also needs to acknowledge he is not up to the job. He has presided over a fiasco in the Department of Health for the past three years. Perhaps he did not hear, but some of his backbenchers have started to call him a reforming Minister, and this is code if we have ever heard it.

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