Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Cullinane and I are in danger of vigorously agreeing with each other. I agree with him. He says that we propose to increase the workload without increasing capacity. We do not. I am saying the opposite of that. That is the reason for the phased approach. There are several steps to this.

We in this House need to create the legal framework for it, and that is what we are doing tonight. Once we do that, we can sit down with the Irish Medical Organisation, representing general practice, and say that this is the will of the Oireachtas and the Government and we are only going to do it in line with capacity, and we can ask the representatives how it can be done. We want to listen to general practice and my hope is that the GPs listening to this debate will be glad to hear that. I hope they are glad to hear words and phrases like "consultation", "phased approach" and "doing it in line with capacity". As the Deputy correctly says - we are really in agreement here - there is no point, particularly in a Covid world, in increasing workload without putting in place the capacity. We have to do this in a collaborative way, in engagement with general practice, and that is what we want to do.

The Deputy asked if we are putting the cart before the horse, to which I would say that maybe we are. Perhaps we could have had those conversations first and then come into the House and looked to get the legislation passed, or maybe we say, "Let us get the legislation through so that we can crack on with the implementation." I am not hung up on which way it is done. We have chosen to bring in the legislation as quickly as we can in this Dáil term to ensure there are no legislative impediments and that we have a framework to engage with general practice and to be able to say it will be done in three phases and let us talk about what GPs need and about the timing. We want to ensure that when we open up this extra demand, general practice can deal with it.

See this speech in context