Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to get the opportunity to raise a number of issues relating to the budget. When we talk about the budget, right around the country people anticipate or hope that their sector or their cause will get funding. We welcome the positive aspects of the budget but there are many other aspects of it that neglect and do not adequately address the issues that need to be addressed.

I recognise the extra spend that has been put into health again this year, but I am worried that, like all the other money, it will be consumed by the HSE. While I recognise that we have to have managers, it is evident that the HSE is top heavy with administrative staff and we do not have enough front-line staff. Our front-line staff are not paid adequately to ensure they remain in our health service to provide the healthcare that we need to provide for people who present as sick and who have health problems and issues. There is not a house in the State where someone is not affected one way or another as the days go by.

I wish to highlight to the Minister of State what is and is not happening in University Hospital Kerry in Tralee. We have had five Ministers for Health and I have raised this issue so many times; for the past five months there have been no orthopaedic operations. There have been emergency surgeries but no elective surgery has taken place in the hospital for the past five months. I would plead this case. It would not be too much for the Minister for Health to visit the hospital and challenge the manager to see what is going on there. I ask that the Minister would meet the hospital manager. On two or three occasions we have been given indications that these services would start, perhaps at the start of September or the middle of September. Then they were to start on 15 October and on 1 November. Now the services have not started. I feel that it will now go into the new year. This is not good enough when elderly people are roaring in pain to have their hips replaced. I know of one man who cannot sit down; he either has to stand or lie down. That has been his story for four or five months. He cannot see anybody as no one will see him. Another person was so bad with pain for his knee problem that he had to go to Belfast last week to be seen and to get treatment.

Earlier, the Taoiseach said that treatment waiting list numbers were going down. I can assure him that the numbers have gone down in Kerry for people waiting on cataract, hip or knee procedures. This is because Deputies Michael Healy-Rae and Michael Collins and I have a bus going to the North every weekend. People are brought up to the North at the weekend and they are being seen and treated during the weekend. That does not happen in the hospitals in the South where elective surgery does not happen over the weekend. Up North, healthcare staff work around the clock to ensure people are dealt with properly. It is sad to think that elderly people have to go away early in the morning and get on a bus. I admire them for wanting to help themselves. They get on a bus and travel the seven-hour journey to Belfast. They must stay overnight and they get seen to the next day. They then have to travel back again. One man who went on that bus, whose grandfather had his cataracts removed in St. Catherine's Hospital in Tralee 50 years ago in 1968, had to wait seven years for his procedure. He would still be waiting only I took him up to the North of Ireland on the bus where he had his two eyes done. This man is now driving a bus himself. That is the gospel truth.

Tralee hospital is short of consultants, specialists and front-line nurses. We are told that the HSE will advertise for these positions - and maybe it is - but we do not know what is happening. People cannot say, "My leg will only get bad when the consultant arrives". This will not happen because people get sick and they have no control over it. They would certainly like to be well but old age and hard work happens. We will see how concerned our Minister for Health is in ensuring there is money available for abortions.

There will be €12 million, wherever that was found. All of a sudden money was found to carry out abortions. There was lot of talk from the Taoiseach this morning about the Tuam babies and what happened there. What happened there was a scandal to God but what is going to happen to these babies? Where are they going to be put? What grave are they going to have? Will they have a grave? I have asked that question but there has been no answer to it. It beggars belief to think that we are trying to save people and get them back to health while ensuring that we are going to have money to pay for abortions and ensuring that we will have the staff to carry them out. It just does not make sense.

Kenmare hospital is only half opened. It has now been there for eight years and it only half opened. It is the same in Dingle. The site was provided free of charge by the farmer who gave it and we cannot open the rest of it. There are offices in a good part of it. On suicide, it is clear that we are not giving enough money towards mental health and not addressing the issues in that area. The level of suicide in one small pocket of Kerry is such that there have been four suicides in as many weeks, or maybe a bit more. There is an average of 25 people on trolleys in Tralee general hospital. People are waiting to see consultants who are not even there. Again, it is down to the HSE. We just cannot understand it.

The jump from 9% to 13.5% in the VAT rate for the hotel, restaurant and hostelry industry is a major blow to all of Kerry, which is predominantly a tourism county, because in 2009 and 2010 it was the hotel industry and that sector that brought a bit of life back to the county, as did farming. Farming was looked down on but when the farming industry is going well, it brings up the rest of the community around it. Places like Killarney, Kenmare, Dingle, and, indeed, Castleisland and Crag Cave provide attractions and amenities for the people who come in great numbers to our county and they have been doing great work. The Minister of State must realise, however, that most of those places are closed from this time of year until St. Patrick's Day. They depend on the busy months to survive, to sustain and to improve their product. This is a big blow to them.

I and many other people thought that if the rate were to be increased, it should have been done as a gradual transition. If it was raised by 1.5% each year, in three years we would have reached 13.5%. People would have worked towards that and perhaps it could have been accepted. Hairdressers were outside the gates yesterday. They are also very hurt by the increase. It was a savage increase for them. To be competitive they will either have to forgo any profit they were making or, as one hairdresser said to me, they will not be able to take on young trainees because they just will not have the funds to do so.

We are worn out from talking about housing. Each and every Member here is as concerned as the next. There are so many reports and so many actions and different things. The Government keeps saying it is not a matter of funding. Will the Minister of State please explain why up to 50 people are waiting for rural cottages in Kerry and yet only ten will be built from 2016 to 2021? These people have the sites themselves. I was even told by one young person whom I asked about it the other day that nobody will even come out to see him for three years. Imagine that, when he has the site himself and we are talking about putting roofs over people's heads.

Rents have increased. There are a lot of complaints about landlords. I would say that 99% of landlords are fine, but they also find themselves on a tough wicket. If they get €150 a week for a house and are taxed at 50% or 52%, it means that they are only getting €75. The Government is actually getting half of the rental value of the house. The landlord has to provide for the upkeep and the insurance and pay all the other things to ensure that the house is standing in reasonably good shape. Under the tenant purchase scheme, local authorities used to always get a bit of money to do up voids and vacant houses. The scheme that is there at present will not allow 80% of the people who apply to buy out their local authority house to do so. We are waiting for the Government to review that and I would be very grateful if the Minister of State will explain that again to his colleague.

Demountable homes do not cost very much but we are not allowed to have them in Kerry any more unless there is a fire or flooding. It was always an acceptable standard of housing for a lone farmer whose house went into bad repair and could not be repaired or who, for one reason or another, had a site and a place for a septic tank and everything. We are not allowed to have them any more. That is a departmental guideline. We can only have them in the event of a fire or a flood.

I spoke about agriculture this morning. The farmers were begging for €200 per suckler cow. They will get €40 through the beef genomics scheme but this scheme is not what it set out to be. Farmers are now being asked to weigh the calves and the cows. This is dangerous work that involves health and safety issues. To gain this €40 they will have to spend approximately €20. We are being told that many people are getting out of this scheme, and will be getting out of it next year, because it is too hard, overcomplicated and bureaucratic. Many farmers, as I said, are exiting the scheme.

We are talking about jobs. The provision of jobs is vital for the survival of rural areas. I, like other Deputies, cannot understand what is happening at present to the jobs in Bord na Móna in the heart of our country. If we survive long enough, this country will be all environmentalists and no one will be working if the environmentalists continue to get their way as they have been. There is now going to be a rush. We believe that all the Departments are going to visit the place and strategies will be put in place to see where they can find jobs for these fellows from Kildare, Longford, Offaly and Roscommon. I know one man who has been there since he was 16 years of age. He is now 59. Where is he going to go? Why did the Government - we will not just blame this Government, but the last one too - not talk to the people in these places and see what could be done to provide jobs for them if the Government is going to make them lose the jobs they have?

It is absolutely ridiculous. What they were doing was sourcing what was their own and selling briquettes and turf. There is nothing wrong with that. As I have said today and other days, if Ireland was totally emission free, it would only mean 0.13% in the worldwide context. That is the truth. It would amount to 0.13% in the world overall. We are tripping over ourselves to meet these guidelines, the 2030 Paris agreement or whatever, yet in China and Japan, they cannot see their noses or feet with the smog and smoke. That is a fact. The Government will paralyse the people with carbon taxes and stop them cutting turf for sale in the midlands. If these environmentalists get their way, they will stop people cutting turf in their own places where they have traditionally cut it over the years. That is how my grandmother survived and that is how she reared my father and all the rest of them by selling a bit of turf to the local garda or whoever it was. They did not hurt the country or the world one little bit. With regard to the people who are still doing it, it was grand to see them at it this summer when the weather was fine. It is not so nice when it rains; it is tough then. It is wrong to try to tell the people in the midlands who were working in Bord na Móna that we will get some other job for them because the environmentalists are saying they are doing harm and affecting climate change. The climate changed back over the years and it is a fact. I will say it again because it is the truth and when one is telling the truth, it is not a lie. The temperature has risen by less than 1% since 1850. That is the truth. It is God's gospel truth. It has risen by less than 1% since 1850 and we are going to drive people down through the ground. We will make the people in Kildare, Offaly, Roscommon and Longford give up their jobs for these environmentalists who have these mad kinds of notions. I would say if we looked to each and every one of those environmentalists, not one of them has ever hired a man or a woman or has never paid a fellow on a Friday evening because if they had, they would realise money does not fall out of the sky and that one has to work for it. Friday evening comes very fast when fellows have to be paid. If they are not going to be paid in the midland counties and if they do not have jobs - it is hard to see where they will come from all of a sudden - the Government and the State will have to pay social welfare to them. Everybody else who remains working will be contributing towards that cost.

With regard to women's pensions, we hope the issue of the women who were wrong-changed in their pensions as a result of the 2012 changes introduced by the then Minister, Deputy Burton, will be addressed in the coming year. There were also women before that who worked in the home and who were never recognised and many do not get a pension of their own. They get paid on their husband's pension but they still need to be recognised because they played a part in the formation of our country. They are the women who brought the people who are running the country today into the world and fed them and reared them. We should not forget about them. Their numbers are diminishing because they are getting older. They should have been recognised in this budget.

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