Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I never get praise like that, a Chathaoirligh. May you enjoy it.

I think it is appropriate that the Minister of State at the Department of Justice is here, because there is a complete lack of justice, fairness and equality in our health system. It is ironic that is has been left to the junior Minister for Justice to be here for a health debate. I thank Sinn Féin once again for bringing the motion. I welcome the opportunity to speak on it, although I tire of hearing my own voice. One colleague outside said it is Groundhog Day. That is what it feels like all the time when we come to debating health services. I thought we had come to a reasonable situation when we had a committee that looked at the issue and came up with Sláintecare, so that we could stop this continuous raising of crises and waiting lists. That has not happened. Today, there are 561 patients on trolleys, 44 of whom are in Galway. Yesterday, there were 516 patients on trolleys, 46 of whom were in Galway. On 3 January this year, there were 77 patients on trolleys in Galway out of a total of 931. The figures relating to waiting lists have been set out. There are 888,000 patients on waiting lists, as referenced by Deputy Cullinane. I thank him for highlighting that.

We may ask what is going on. What is going on is that we are absolutely normalising a totally abnormal situation. It is not acceptable for people to be waiting two and three years for essential surgery. It is not acceptable for people to be on trolleys. We know from Dr. Hickey, who has repeatedly pointed it out, that at the most basic level we have 300 premature deaths per year because of time spent on trolleys. We have said all of this over and over again. The cross-party group produced Sláintecare, and yet we are still in this complete and utter mess, while all of the time the private hospitals are making profit. They are making profit on those going there with their VHI or whatever insurance they have, and fair play to them; they are entitled to do that. However, we are also helping the private hospitals to make a profit by channelling people through the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, and other schemes. The role of the Government is to help companies - mostly the companies that own the private hospitals - to make a profit.

We introduced the NTPF 21 years ago. You would imagine that we would have a little bit of sense 21 years later. At the time when we introduced the NTPF, I understood that like the housing assistance payment, HAP, it was to be a temporary measure because of the state that the health service was in then. It had funding of €5 million at the time. When I looked at the funding that it has in 2023, I learned that €240 million has been allocated to the NTPF, and there are Deputies appealing for that to be increased, as they are with the HAP. I see where they are coming from. We are in a most abnormal situation. We should not need a NTPF to channel people into private hospitals to be treated by the consultants who let them sit on a waiting list, and by a management that let that waiting list get bigger. We channel them into private hospitals all over the country, including in Kilkenny. A patient I know was waiting over two years for an injection for pain. In the end, that person drove themselves down to the private hospital in Kilkenny and back up to Galway. There is any number of such examples. I know an 81-year-old man who has been waiting for over two years to get on a list for surgery. He has been told that if it gets worse, he should tell the GP. He is hobbling around Galway. I also know of a 60-year-old female who has been waiting two years for urgent hip surgery. I am not just throwing these examples out. Just as I believe in public housing as a major part of the solution to the housing crisis, I believe in a public health system as a right. Yet, we are not delivering that. We are talking the talk, but all the time privatising in every way possible. Primary care is being provided by private for-profit companies that are not owned by the State. We lease the primary care centres for a certain period of time. All of the time, we are privatising by stealth. Recently, a person near to me had to avail of a primary care service. It was delivered by a private company with management and everything in Dublin. The company came to Galway and provided a service that was a very good service. It had all been privatised.

Taking Galway as a microcosm of the country, we are not taking the pressure off the hospital, which is creaking at the seams, and we will not have an ED for another few years. We have had a temporary ED in the meantime. An elective hospital has been promised, when really the answer was to build a brand new hospital in Merlin Park but it never happened. We have a district hospital in Clifden that could take the pressure off, that is limping from day to day. There is a day centre in An Cheathrú Rua, which I will be talking about later in the Topical Issue Debate, that has been closed since Covid. That is repeated all over the country, where pressure is placed on hospitals because of the failure of primary care and the failure to have step-down facilities. Of course, we have also allowed home care to degenerate, and the conditions are appalling in the mostly women-dominated home care service. It is simply appalling what we have allowed to happen in our name. We have normalised it and we have reduced our sense of outrage. The day that I lose my outrage in relation to people on trolleys for any length of time, I will be leaving this Dáil.

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