Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I support the fact that a Bill has been introduced again this year so that we can end up creating a situation where people who are older or sick are protected through the equalisation of premiums. That is important. I want to speak to the matter at hand, namely why we have to have private health insurance in this country. Some people want to have private health insurance but if we had a universal health service, we would not need it. We are a fair shot away from that yet. If we are to strive to get to universal healthcare, we need to do a number of things. We are doing those things but we are doing them at a slow pace.

In my home town of Tuam, a mental health day hospital has opened at the former Bon Secours Hospital at The Grove, which was closed for 20 years. It took 20 years to open it. A new children's disability network team, Team 7, is in a fine building in the same complex but unfortunately it is only at half staff level, if even that. I have parents ringing and emailing me all of the time and they are now clubbing together because they are all sharing the same bad experiences. They cannot get services for their children.

Why is this happening? People are afraid that they will not get any service unless they have health insurance. In Galway we have University Hospital Galway, or the regional hospital, as we call it. We know there are plans to do a fantastic amount of work there and while it is moving in the right direction, it is at a very slow pace. This is the problem when a regional hospital is serving more than 1 million people. It is a centre of excellence for cancer. It is very hard to attract staff to that hospital because prefabs and old-style nightingale wards from the 1950s and 1960s are still in operation. All of that is going on in a centre of excellence. The Government needs to push on with investment in the infrastructure. Where such investment happens, it is fantastic. A new bed block is being bulit in Portiuncula University Hospital, which will be a major addition but that has been going on for nearly ten years. To give another small example, a fine primary care centre was built in Tuam and opened seven or eight years ago but it was forgotten to put in an X-ray facility. In 2017, the then Minister, Deputy Harris, provided funding to put in the facility. In the past couple of weeks the bit of construction that is needed has started and the facility will probably be open next year, seven years after the funding was provided. That project just involved the conversion of a space within an existing modern building but because of the type of public-private partnership contract involved, it involved layers and layers of legal letters and contracts before the contractor could get in to do that work. That X-ray facility will take some of the pressure off the accident and emergency department in Galway because people from north Galway and south Mayo will be able to have their X-rays done in Tuam. The X-rays will be read in Portiuncula and that will free up some capacity in the regional hospital. The equipment was bought a number of years ago and I just hope it is not out of date when the staff go to use it.

That is the archaic way the delivery of infrastructure has been dealt with. If we have good infrastructure and good, modern hospitals, the HSE will be able to attract staff. The staff it needs to attract are those who have gone to foreign lands, having got their education here, be they nurses, doctors or therapists. They fly the nest and off they go but if we want to attract them back, we need to have inviting facilities for them, not prefabs and old buildings. We need to have them coming back into modern facilities where they can enjoy their work and thrive at it.

Finally, my own experience of the health service over the years tells me that we are delivering a great service in the public sector. Anybody I know, bar a few, who has gone into the health service here has been taken care of very well. Our workers, particularly our nurses and doctors, are all first class. Based on my own experience with my own family, I can say that without fear or favour. Once someone is in the system, he or she is taken care of but the problem is getting in. We should try to improve our infrastructure so that we can attract staff and that way we can leave private health insurance behind us in the time to come. We need to set out that vision and a plan by which we will achieve it over a number of years.

See this speech in context