Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There are a lot of issues that will have to be dealt with in the Covid inquiry but certain things are beyond question. The Irish health service is operating at near 100% capacity. Most countries in Europe operate at about 80% to 85%. If we are hit with further public health emergencies or major accidents, unless we have a buffer within our health system, which means additional capacity so we are not tipping over the edge of the ability of our system to cope on a day-to-day basis, we will be in very serious trouble. All the hardships we saw during Covid could be seen again. What is the Government going to do to ensure that we get ICU capacity at the same levels as the rest of the European Union when it is well below? Is it not time to recognise that having a fragmented, half privatised system is not the way to maximise the capacity that we have in our health service? We need an integrated national, publicly owned and run health service rather than the partially privatised and fragmented system that we have. Considering that staff are the key to increasing capacity, is it not very counter-productive that the Government is holding out on giving public service workers, including nurses and other health workers, a decent pay increase to entice them to stay and work in this country and in our health service? Many of them are leaving because their pay, their income, as the Taoiseach referred to earlier, is insufficient to give them a decent standard of life or for them to be able to afford accommodation in this country.

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