Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Barry. It is important to say the health crisis we have, the trolley crisis we have annually, is not a natural disaster. It is not a natural function of winter. It is a policy-made disaster that we get regularly. Those polices are a commitment to a two-tier fragmented health service with a chronic lack of capacity and staffing in emergency departments, acute and elective hospital services, ICU, public health teams, primary care and GP services, mental health and disability services, step-down nursing home places, home care and more. It is a commitment to continuing a for-profit part of our health service, and the for-profit part of our health service only exists if there are problems with the not-for-profit parts of our health service. Finally, this year, on top of those annual problems, we have an extra problem in terms of policy to do with Covid where the Government did not take seriously enough the continuing threat of Covid, on top of which are the flu and the respiratory syncytial virus, RSV. There is nowhere near enough of an effort in terms of promoting the use of masks. We should be listening to the likes of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, and the unions representing bus drivers. There is still no action in terms of ventilation and filtration in our public buildings. Earlier I saw a picture from Davos where a number of world leaders were having a conversation. They had HEPA filters in front of them because they work and have an impact. The lack of action in this regard in this country has added to the crisis. It is policy driven. It does not have to be this way.

In the conversations that happen around the regular health crisis, there is often an attempt to obfuscate and to present the whole thing as more complex than it really is and beyond anyone's understanding, as if we keep giving money to this thing and it still does not seem to work in order to make people think there is nothing that can possibly be done about it. Of course, there are complex parts to it and structural issues, but at the basis of the health crisis we have that particularly expresses itself every winter is a basic issue around capacity in terms of beds and staff to go with those beds. Where, in the early 1980s, Ireland had 17,500 hospital beds in our health system, today bed capacity is just over 11,000. It is the same as it was in 2009, when the population was half a million people lower than it is today. That is at the core of the crisis. That is the most important fact that explains why we have the crisis we have. In comparing the number of hospital beds per 1,000 of population in this country, at 2.9, to the EU average of 5.3, we are at little more than half the EU average. An extra 5,000 hospital beds are urgently needed in the public health system to address this core capacity problem.

The other side of this is the enormous profits that are made in private healthcare in this country. Vast amounts of public money are being drained off into the private sector, which also benefits from significant tax subsidies. Three weeks ago, Mr. Larry Goodman's Blackrock Clinic reported a doubling of profits, to €14.5 million, on revenues of just under €160 million. This profiting from our health crisis must stop. We should stop having a public health service that is underfunded and under-resourced and allows the private health system to operate, and the private hospitals should be absorbed into the public system to contribute to the extra capacity we need. We need to take these into the public health system. We need to build an all-island national health service.

I want to say a couple of sentences on the possibility of industrial action by the INMO representing nurses and midwives. They, together with the patients in the hospitals, are really on the front line of the crisis that is of the Government's making. Every year, they are the ones who come out with the trolley watch figures. They are the ones who put this on the political agenda and put real pressure on the Government. Every year, we get the commitments saying action will be taken and this will stop, yet it happens year after year and it is now worse than ever. Nurses and midwives have been left with no choice but to take action.

We can see from Britain that strike action by nurses has put serious pressure on a hard-nosed Tory Government to negotiate. Industrial action by nurses and midwives here would be enormously popular. I was on a television programme where people were asked to text in, and more than 80% of people said they would support strike action by nurses and midwives. This would have the impact of galvanising public support for a mass campaign to force the Government to invest properly in our health service in order to protect patients' lives and the working conditions of all those who are in it.

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