Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

People Before Profit will vote no confidence in the Minister for Health, not just because of his failures but because of the collective political failures of Fine Gael and three of its Ministers to protect our health service and deal with the litany of crises which beset that health service and inflict unbearable, unacceptable suffering and hardship on sick and vulnerable people who need that health service.

There were 512 people waiting on trolleys yesterday; 700,000 people on hospital waiting lists; a CervicalCheck scandal where the Minister, despite repeated appeals, refuses to identify the laboratories that gave the false negative; mental health services in a shocking state with only 50% of the recommended staffing levels under A Vision for Change; a medicinal cannabis access programme that was promised for people who are suffering and need it but which was never delivered; a nurses' strike that was brought on because of the failure of the Government to address unsafe staffing levels across our hospitals and a refusal to recognise that it was a result of poor pay for nurses; a National Ambulance Service strike that the Government is completely indifferent to as it unfolds and will not lift a finger to address even though it would not cost a cent; completely inadequate home care services for many of our elderly and disabled; a total failure to deliver on primary care commitments; general practitioners protesting because of an unprecedented crisis in general practice, and to top it all off, a complete inability to manage the finances that are required to deliver the health system coming to a head in the debacle around the national children's hospital. The Government under Deputy Varadkar said it will cost €650 million and it has spiralled to €1.7 billion and is rising.

The Minister should ask himself this very simple question. If I was Minister for Health and he was in opposition, and I was responsible for that litany of crises and failures, would he vote confidence in me? The answer is "No" and everybody knows it. For Fianna Fáil to refer to national sabotage for voting no confidence in a Government and Minister that has presided over those failures with all the hardship and suffering that has resulted from it is ridiculous. Is it not a form of national sabotage of our health system to leave people suffering on trolleys, on waiting lists, and in need of medicines that they cannot get, or to force strikes by healthcare workers who do not want to go on strike but have to because of unsafe staffing levels with chronic staff shortages in the health service? That is sabotage. There have been seven years of sabotage of the public health service by Fine Gael. We could not, in all good conscience, vote confidence in policies or Ministers that have presided over that debacle.

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