Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for her reply. I will deal with the issue of school dentistry first. The problem is that the children are not being seen. In Laois, the school year being completed is 2019-20. According to the previous paragraph in the document that I got, this refers to sixth class, which means that the children are in third year or they are moving into fifth year. I can tell the Minister of State I have first-hand experience with a family member and the children of neighbours living around us who were seen in fifth year. That is not satisfactory. They have to be seen in primary school. I acknowledge the Minister of State is logical about these things and she is interested in primary care. This needs to be done in primary level for preventative treatment. It is too late by the time they get to secondary school.

The Minister of State outlined figures and the HSE will provide them, but in Laois there is not one dentist, and I defy anybody who says otherwise. We have done an extensive trawl and phoned around every dentist in the county. There is no dentist in Laois who will take a new patient under the DTSS. In emergencies, we do what the Minister of State has outlined in that we send patients to the HSE. It is a battle. They end up going to Tullamore and eventually, depending on whether it is an emergency, they may or may not get treatment. That is not acceptable and we have to fix it.

I have seen at first hand the efforts made by the HSE to recruit dentists and while I want to acknowledge that, they are failing. There is something wrong if we have a situation where we are training so many dentists every year but somehow or other there are none available They are not all going into private practice. Many of them are emigrating. If the Minister of State does nothing else, I ask her to consider this issue from the perspective of trying to capture, for want of a better term, those people, that is, to try to get some of those good dentists into work on the scheme. As for the private schemes, contracting on its own is not working and is not satisfactory. A cohort of directly-employed dentists that the HSE control, employ and manage is needed. That is the point.

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