Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I would like to thank everybody who works in the HSE. Great work is done in many hospitals, including by front-line nurses, doctors, surgeons, secretaries and everybody else. However, there are huge issues around the whole running of the HSE and the Department of Health. I also want to sympathise with the Carter family and the other 17 families involved here. It is truly horrific by any standards. It is a horror story. One would imagine that one was in a Third World country.

When I came here first in 2007, I think - and I can check the figures - the budget was between €8 billion and €10 billion a year. Now it is more than €21 billion or €22 billion, and we are facing a €1 billion overrun. Money is being gobbled up, wasted, abused and misused. It is shocking. We still have not got any accountability for what happened and what went wrong here. I am not on a witch hunt against this surgeon but where are the oversights?

The former Minister for Health, Deputy Simon Harris, who was in the Minister, Deputy Donnelly's chair in 2017, said that no child would wait more than four months for a scoliosis operation. Today, there are 120 waiting more than 12 months. Does the Minister ever check back on the statements made and the messages of hope that might be given in those statements to the patients, their parents and families? Does he ever examine that? Can he sleep at night wondering? It is not money that is the problem with the Department of Health and the HSE. It could not be money.

Then we look at the national children's hospital, a runaway gravy train for God knows whoever, at the fact those contracts were signed, at what is going on there and at the way it is left. The children of Ireland deserve more.

We just came from a mental health briefing in the audiovisual room, and the child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, situation in south Tipperary is just appalling. It just goes to show that children in our country are not being valued. Young people cannot get driver's licences. They cannot get any kind of facilities and for mental health, above all else, they cannot get them. They have not got the resources.

We saw the childcare people protesting outside today. Why are our youngest, brightest and most vulnerable being blackguarded by this Government and administration and by several administrations, the Department of Health and successive Ministers? Blackguarding is all I could call it. It seems that there is some kind of an uncaring attitude. Our Constitution talks about cherishing children equally and we all want to aspire to that. Anyone with children and grandchildren knows that. This is truly shocking and I fail to find the words to describe the true horror of this.

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