Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I commend the work my colleague David Cullinane has put into this motion. I say to the families, parents and advocates who are present here today and outside the House that I hope it gets widespread support in the House.

In 2017, the Minister, Deputy Harris, promised that no child would be left waiting for longer than four months for surgery for scoliosis and spina bifida. The Government has utterly failed to meet this promise. Not only has it failed to meet this target - from an already unacceptable level - but waiting lists for scoliosis-related surgery have now got worse than they were when that commitment was given. It is now seven years later and the Government has no answers for these children and their parents and families who are left waiting. It is simply unacceptable. The Government must now listen to, engage with and act on the concerns of parents, guardians, advocates and clinicians about these outrageously long waiting lists. They want a task force that is transparent, independent of CHI and empowered to implement a plan to improve services. This includes a full suite of care from pre-op to post-op, transitional care, specialist rehabilitation and full and appropriate access to community services. We are calling on the Government to resource and expand the paediatric orthopaedic elective care centre at Cappagh and to deliver a centre for elective paediatric urology services. We must not see any more broken promises from the Government.

I spoke to a number of these children and their parents outside. God, they are beautiful children and their parents must be so proud of them. They are cheerful and stoic and happy to talk. However, let us not forget the pain they are in and the fact that they have had to make the effort to come here. None of those parents or children want to be here on a Tuesday evening in February, but the situation has got so bad that things need to be brought to a head. Nobody wants to be in this situation. It is the responsibility of the Minister, his Department and the Government that these families have felt this to be necessary and that we have felt it necessary to propose this motion. I regret that the Minister has tabled his amendment. I hope he will reconsider it. Most of all, I hope he can say something in five minutes' time that will give some confidence to those families that things are going to get better, because the way things are now is just not good enough.

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