Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the motion. I am always straight and to the point. This is about doing the right thing. It is about addressing the issues of major underinvestment in these vital services. Most of the speakers have mentioned the specifics of the cancers and so on. They are right when they say we have all lost family members and that families are decimated by cancer. I wish to address the underinvestment. It is probably the only opportunity I will get to put this on the Dáil record. I have been listening to some deeply disturbing stories coming out of the geriatric ward in Cork University Hospital, CUH, over the past two days on a radio station in Cork called RedFM, specifically on "The Neil Prendeville Show". I hope to send the Minister the podcast of it. It addresses duty of care and how patients have been treated.

This motion is all about doing the right thing. I have looked at the Government amendment to it. I am afraid it would result in something of a watering down of the motion and a return to the status quo. I do not want to go into the specifics of it. I am just appealing to the Minister. There are many more speakers here. The motion goes in the right direction to do the right things. We constantly come in here and debate underfunding. There is the line "where there is an action there is an instant reaction". We are always reactive instead of proactive. My wife is going to kill me for saying this in the Chamber, but I will say it: prevention is better than cure.

One of the speakers mentioned people going back to work. That would result in a better quality of life for people. What is affecting many people at the moment is the worry of getting an appointment and nothing happening for months. It has to be torture. I do not know whether it is a medical fact, but it has been said that extreme worry and stress can bring on cancer in the stomach, the bowel and so on, and here we are, our people stressed to their limit, waiting for appointments and waiting to see whether they can get positive or negative results. This puts indescribable pressure on all family members, and the knock-on effect of that is the kids going to school, mammy or daddy being unwell and elderly parents or grandparents being worried about it.

We know we can address this if we put the right protocols in place, so I appeal to the Minister to take stock and have a look at the motion. It is very simple, straightforward and black-and-white. It does what we should be doing, which is the right thing. We should invest in the services now and then, I hope, we will see the results of this in a number of years' time.

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