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

Then the truth is revealed when Deputy Donnelly gets up to speak and it is very clear that the party with whom Fine Gael has just agreed a deal, and the deal itself, make a clear and explicit commitment not to go forward, but to go back. That commitment is to reopen private healthcare and to source the additional capacity that we now need more than ever. We needed it badly before Covid but we now need it even more badly. More capacity is required, but is going to be sourced through the NTPF where we are going to rent it from the profiteers in the private healthcare sector rather than move immediately forward, and not back, as the Minister suggested he wanted to do, to a national health system which would be a single-tier universal national healthcare system. We can have all the aspiration toward Sláintecare with words like "in ten years" and "accelerate", but in actuality the plan is to immediately move back to the two-tier system and to source additional capacity by renting it at extortionate cost from Larry Goodman, Denis O'Brien and all the people who make a fortune out of this stuff. There is the spin.

Is it not the case that the heaping of praise on healthcare workers in the same context rings deeply hollow and is, in fact, hypocritical? What is capacity in the Irish health service? Before Covid we were running at 100% capacity. In the case of ICU capacity, we were 50% below where we needed to be and now we need even more. In the general system, we need an increase in capacity of at least 20% and with social distancing, we need more than that. If we are going to have a single tier health system, it should be permanent capacity and not rented from the private sector. We need more ICU capacity.

What then is that capacity? It is the staff. It is not the beds because we can get the beds pretty quickly. How are we treating the staff? We know the answer. Some 70,000 people who the Minister lauded and on whom he heaped praise, and who deserved to be praised, volunteered to come back and work in the health service but the Government will not recruit them.

The Taoiseach then says on national television that anyone who wants to work in the health service will be hired - this is the spin - if there is a post. It is brilliant. Of course, the number of approved posts is nowhere near what is necessary to give us the additional permanent capacity because the Minister will not approve the posts. Is that not the truth?

Instead we recruit people on agency contracts, hire them and fire them contracts, and we can throw them back out. By the way, the fourth year student nurses can be thrown back out there as healthcare assistants and so on. There is no real commitment to the permanent increases in capacity. I will give the Minister 20 seconds to answer that.

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