Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to have the opportunity to speak and thank Deputy McGrath and his staff for putting this important motion together. At the outset, I want to convey my deepest sympathy to Deputy Michael Collins, a member of our group, Councillor Danny Collins and the mother of Michael Lynch. Michael was a nephew of Deputy Collins and tragically lost his life in the last few days.

We pass on our condolences and sincerely wish them strength and that God will assist them in this very difficult time they are encountering.

This motion is basically about the lack of GPs. People cannot get a satisfactory service with GPs at present. Elderly people cannot get appointments. No GP is in a position to take on local families, including those returning to Killarney and many other parts of Kerry, because they are so overstretched. I remind the Minister of State that up to 5,000 new people with medical cards have been placed in Killarney. As these people have medical cards, the doctors have to take on so many of them. This is putting a severe strain on the service. I have dealt with many cases of people, including those returning to the area, who cannot get a doctor to take them on.

I would also like to speak about ambulance delays. I know of a little baby of three months old who stopped breathing and the doctor could not attend. The doctor did the next best thing and organised an ambulance. It took an hour an a half to come and that is not satisfactory. A young life could have been lost. It is only by the grace of God that this child is still alive. That is serious stuff. What the reconfiguration of the ambulance service in 2012 has meant to local areas is a reduction in the service. The word they used at that time was "reconfiguration", but what it has meant is a reduction in the service.

When people take family members into University Hospital Kerry, they have to wait many hours for doctors there. I had a call from a family whose mom was taken in there in the last few days. It was many hours before the doctor could attend to this elderly lady. She spent many hours on a trolley before she actually got a bed. One of the sons rang me again yesterday to say that the family have been advised by the hospital that some family member must come in to feed their mother and to attend to the tablets she needs to take. That this is happening brings it home to me in a very real way that there is a lack of medics, nurses and staff in University Hospital Kerry. A couple of years ago during Covid times - God help us - family members were not allowed to go in to feed their people. We can say that this left them seriously compromised without being fed properly. That was very wrong. It was a dark hour in our history when family members could not go in to visit their elderly people in the last days of their lives. When they became unconscious, everyone was let in.

We have a serious problem in rural areas in getting a GP service. I thank Dr. Gary Stack and others who set up SouthDoc some years ago. My father, the late Jackie Healy-Rae, worked very hard with Dr. Stack and others to provide an out-of-hours service, but we do not have enough GPs in that service now. If you get sick on a Friday evening, it is a long wait until Monday morning. People cannot organise that they will not get sick during those hours because people do. Gone is the day when Dr. O'Callaghan or Dr. Boland would come to the house to the elderly person or whoever was sick. That time is long gone. We depend on SouthDoc but we need that service to be enhanced because the doctors start out in Killarney on one side and have to travel all the way through Kilgarvan and Kenmare back to the county bounds in Lauragh, down through Templenoe and Blackwater as far as Sneem and over Moll's Gap down into Killarney. They travel massive distances and they are under savage pressure to see after people. We need more GPs. As has been said already, they are the first point of contact for any family member who has someone sick or for an elderly person living on their own who is sick and needs a doctor. Sometimes it is desperately hard to talk to a doctor - to get one on the phone - because they are so busy. As I have said, families are being advised to come in to feed their elderly family members in the hospital. That shows how understaffed the hospital is.

So much money is going into the HSE but we still do not have a proper service. I see all the people going out in the country early every morning, working hard and paying their taxes. This is one of the things their taxes are for. They are not getting the rewards for the taxes they are paying in this regard.

The rural healthcare crisis extends to emergency dental care provision. Children are forced to wait up to ten years for treatment. Less than half of eligible children were seen under the school screening programme last year. This is terribly serious because if children outgrow the time for getting the treatment, their mouths may not be perfect anymore. They get one chance and we should be doing a lot more there.

The rural healthcare crisis is further exacerbated by a severe shortage of home helps, the worsening crisis in every accident and emergency department, the non-existent mental healthcare service and the severe lack of residential places for people with physical and mental disabilities. Too often, I have heard stories from people who tried to get a place for their son or daughter. I have met those people. I feel very hurt when I am at the door looking for a vote and they tell me what happened. They tried to get their child kept in a residential place because they were worried, but it did not happen. As much as they minded them and tried - people know when a youngster is in trouble - they could not get the proper care for them and they lost them. That is a sad reflection of our healthcare system.

I call on the Government to explain how, despite an increased national healthcare budget, the country is witnessing a steady deterioration of our health services, especially in rural communities. If all things were equal, we would still need more doctors to travel the expansive and extensive areas that they have to cover in rural places like the Iveragh Peninsula, the Dingle Peninsula and the Beara Peninsula on the south side of Kenmare Bay.

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