Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

First, I would like to thank and acknowledge the Regional Group for tabling this important motion. At the time when the ambulance service was centralised here in Dublin, I was vehemently opposed to that. I want to thank and acknowledge the past and present management structure of our National Ambulance Service in County Kerry. They do the very best with what they have, but unfortunately the structure means that at times there are big gaps in our ambulance service not due to any fault of theirs but because of the structure and the way it is set up. If you take an area as vast as the Iveragh Peninsula, if the Cahersiveen ambulance is gone, an ambulance from Killarney or Kenmare, or even from outside the county, might have to go down to the Iveragh Peninsula. That does not make sense. It is not a good use of our ambulance time.

The personnel who work there go beyond the call of duty and they work diligently at the service they provide. We need more doctors in the community, but it is getting harder and harder to get doctors to live, work and provide a service in our communities compared to what we had before. That is making more and more people go to our larger hospitals, which increases the waiting times in those places.

I want to thank people like Gary Stack and the organisers in SouthDoc in County Kerry. The work they do in the out-of-hours service is tremendous. They really do their best but we need to up our game and we need to do more. I want to give an example of what ambulance personnel do. There was a situation in the heart of Kenmare where Rachel O'Sullivan was giving an emergency birth to her twins, Ryan and Amber. Bryan Kelly from the ambulance service in Kenmare came to the rescue and saved the life of one of the twins. It was the little girl who was in trouble during her delivery. It was thanks to that ambulance technician's skill and expertise that on a kitchen floor in a house in Kilkeana outside of Kenmare this lovely little child was successfully brought into the world. That is our ambulance service and our ambulance personnel. They are people who work for the Minister, the Government and the people of Ireland. I salute and thank them, but we must resource them more. We must give them more money. We must give them a better-organised structure so they can do wonderful things, as Bryan Kelly did the day he brought the twins into the world and saved the life of one of them. That is what you call a good day's work by a good Kerry man.

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