Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will be sharing my time with Deputy Aylward.

It is good to get the detail but I find this exercise very frustrating. The outline of the deal was agreed about two weeks ago. The GPs have not seen it, the public have not seen it, and we have not seen it. We are being given pages of facts and figures now. We have not seen them before. I have asked the Department for them and I have asked the HSE. We have been denied access to any of the detail. We are sort of expected to stand up here now and respond.

The Members present are the health spokespeople, by and large, and they should have had the information ahead of time so they could give a reasoned response. I am not accusing the Minister - I have no evidence - but this is controlling the message. We should have had this information days in advance. In fact, we should have had it the day after it was agreed with the IMO.

There are parts that I welcome but it is important to state this is not a new GP contract. It is being sold very much as a new one but it is not. There is an important new GP contract to be had and it is very ambitious and very different. It would reflect a genuine new world of integrated healthcare, care pathways and GP-led primary care.

What we have here is some upgrading of the existing contracts, and some of that is welcome, but that is all it is. The reversal of the financial emergency measures in the public interest, FEMPI, is welcome. It was one of Fianna Fáil's core demands in last year's budget, but four years is too long. General practice is on its knees and I would have preferred that it be done in two years, or three years at maximum.

Free GP care for children under 12 years has a whiff of a pre-election stunt about it. Sláintecare does not say that healthcare should be free, it says it should be universally accessible. That is not defined as free but as access to the healthcare that is necessary without incurring undue financial hardship. I have received replies to parliamentary questions from the Minister in the last few days. I asked how many children this will apply to and the answer was "We don't know" and I asked how much it would cost and the answer was "We don't know". There are no costings and no numbers. That really worries me. The offer of free GP care for children under six years was not properly thought through or executed and it caused a lot of problems.

The proposals on chronic disease management are welcome. It is one part of the agreement I really welcome, and it is moving in the right direction, although some of the numbers are wrong. My concern is not about chronic disease management in the community - that is exactly what should happen - but rather the ability of this Government to implement what is necessary. It is a start which we welcome within reason. We will need a much longer debate on this when we have had time to go through the detail.

See this speech in context