Kathleen Funchion (Carlow-Kilkenny, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for the reply. I will send him the details. The first thing is that there is no response. I can send him copies of the emails and letters we have sent, but unfortunately there is very little of the other side of the story, with the exception of one or two people saying it does not fall into their area.

Unfortunately that is a common theme in the HSE. It is a difficulty patients face all the time. We are supposed to have an Oireachtas line that does not even work on which people cannot even come back to us. There is no point in having these systems in place if they do not work. There is a wider lesson to be learnt for the HSE. It has complete lack of accountability and feels it can brush everything under the carpet and eventually people will stop requesting meetings. However, for me in this case that will never happen. Even if it takes six or seven months to have a meeting, we will persevere with it until we get it.

The idea is to be constructive to see what we can all do as a group to try to progress these issues and relay to the HSE management the experiences of the staff and patients. We often come across stories that they will not hear first-hand. Communication is helpful. It is extremely frustrating to deal with an organisation that feels it is okay to ignore; it should not be okay for anyone to do that, particularly when people rely on us and feel we might be able to get some answers or at least organise a meeting or get a little bit more progress on the issue.

I will send the Minister of State the information and I would appreciate if he could organise a meeting for those of us in the constituency.

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