David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am proud of the wonderful staff we have in our health services. Over recent months, as they battled through Covid, we all gave them a clap on the back and commended their heroics, and rightly so. I have met many of them and can tell the Minister they are hungry for change in healthcare. They want things to be different. They want the tools to do the job. They do not want any more claps on the back from politicians. They want us to do our job, which is to provide the resources to the public system to enable them to give better treatment to patients. They are at the coalface of this. We are talking here about 1.3 million people who are on hospital waiting lists and community waiting lists. The people who are dealing with these patients every single day are staff and they want the tools to do the job to provide better healthcare.

One of the features of the Irish healthcare system is outsourcing. It is something we are very good at. We outsource treatment to private hospitals, and even in the Minister's plan that he announced, we are going to see more of that. We outsource diagnostic tests even though we have 225,000 people waiting for a diagnosis. We outsource cancer screening and, let us be honest, we have seen the consequences of that in recent years. We outsource employment of staff through agencies, which costs huge amounts of money. More and more outsourcing means less and less capacity in the public system. However, we do not just outsource the hiring of staff or outsource services; we also outsource responsibility. It seems we have an absolute failure of accountability and responsibility in the Irish healthcare service.

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