Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Why did the Taoiseach's Government take the decision to drastically underfund the health service in budget 2024? It is a health service that is already under enormous pressure, with record treatment waiting lists, a year-round trolley emergency and an ever-worsening recruitment and retention crisis. Against that backdrop, the Government chose, with its eyes wide open, to blow a massive €1.3 billion hole in funding for the health services people rely on. At the Joint Committee on Health yesterday, the head of the HSE, Bernard Gloster, described the Government's underfunding of the health service as highly unusual. I think Mr. Gloster was being very diplomatic. I would describe the Government's decision as mind-boggling. Incredibly, at a time of record hospital overcrowding, the Government's budget does not provide one additional red cent to fund even one additional hospital bed. Perhaps the most shocking thing is what its decision means for major clinical programmes and national health strategies.

How much new money has been given to the new national stroke strategy? The answer is zero. How much new money has been given to fund new medicines for patients fighting cancer? Zero. How much money has been given to improve our maternity services? Zero. ADHD clinics that were promised two years ago still have not been opened. How are they going to be funded, and what does the Taoiseach say to those who are waiting for those clinics to open? The Government’s decision will have a real impact on families who face some of the biggest challenges of their lives, families who need the Government to fund major improvements in the health service. Instead, it chooses to make things even worse. The recruitment embargo means thousands of vital front-line posts that were supposed to come online will not be filled - junior doctors, healthcare assistants, home help workers. Seven thousand vital posts that are needed for the winter ahead have already been scrapped and the consequences for people will be very real. Make no mistake: the Taoiseach makes this choice in full knowledge of the consequences, guaranteeing that the crisis in our health service will continue, that chronic waiting lists will continue and that overcrowding will continue. People see very clearly now a Government that has thrown in the towel on health.

So, when a child with scoliosis is told they have to wait even longer in pain for surgery, when a sick grandmother is left even longer on a hospital trolley, when a cancer patient cannot get the new drug that could change their lives, people will then remember the Taoiseach's catastrophic decision. Tá an Taoiseach tar éis éirí as an tseirbhís sláinte a shocrú. Is tubaiste é cinneadh an Rialtais gan mhaoiniú a dhéanamh ar an seirbhís sláinte agus caithfear é sin a réiteach. The Government delivered its budget two weeks ago, and now a health service plan will be presented with a deficit of €1.3 billion built in. It is now widely accepted it underfunded the health service, so we need clarity now as to who made this decision. Whose bright idea was this? Was it the Taoiseach’s? Was it the idea of the Minister for Health, of the Minister for Finance or, perhaps, of the man sitting next to the Taoiseach, the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform? Somebody in government pushed for this, and patients and people who will suffer as a result have a right to know whose decision it was. Will the Taoiseach tell us, please, who made this disastrous call?

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