Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCeann Comhairle. Upon taking office in December 2022, the Taoiseach's stated aim was to make Ireland the best country in which to be a child and to improve well-being and opportunity for children. However, there are many children in Ireland today who are being failed by the State. I am talking about children who are denied care in our health system, who are waiting for surgery, who are lost in mental health services or who are not receiving the care and support they so badly need. No parent wants to make public the private pain of their son or daughter, but we are seeing so many who are utterly desperate. Some parents have even been driven to posting videos on social media of their young children sobbing with pain through the night in a desperate effort to secure appropriate healthcare. Those videos are harrowing. It is even more harrowing to meet the parents and the children and hear their stories.

As we know, in 2017, the then Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, made a commitment that no child would be made to wait more than four months for surgery. Yet, children are still waiting longer for spina bifida or scoliosis surgery than was the case when the Government took office. As my colleague, Deputy Duncan Smith, said in the debate last night, 78% of children are waiting longer than Sláintecare target times for paediatric and orthopaedic inpatient appointments and 81% are waiting longer than that target for inpatient urology services. There are also the outpatient waiting lists.

Let us look at the children's mental health services. Yesterday, we heard yesterday from the Children’s Rights Alliance that, for the third year in a row, the Government deserves only an E grade, an unacceptable grade, in respect of access to children's mental health services. Four years ago, the Government made a commitment to end the admission of children to adult psychiatric wards. Yet despite successive damning reports from the Mental Health Commission, children’s ombudsman, and others, the Government has apparently rowed back on that important commitment. The Department of Health has acknowledged that in some cases children with mental health problems will continue to be admitted to inappropriate wards. Last year, 50% of children were unjustifiably admitted to such wards because there were no beds available in child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, units. We know that almost a third of in-patient CAMHS beds were not operational in 2023 due to staff shortages. The waiting list for a first appointment for CAMHS stood at almost 4,000 in July 2023. This is a national disgrace.

On so many fronts, we are seeing vulnerable children let down by State health services. It appears that the Government has quietly abandoned commitments it made on children's health. It is not good enough to say that it may take two successive Government terms to recover this. I heard that the Taoiseach saying that in a response earlier. There are things the Government can do now. The Irish Hospital Consultants Association has pointed to staff shortages as a real factor in driving unacceptable delays for services relating to children. Will the Government end the recruitment freeze and the embargo relating to certain grades in the health service. Will it move to tackle the outrageous waiting lists and address the failings in CAMHS that have been made so glaringly obvious in so many reports, including that from Children's Rights Alliance yesterday.

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