Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for reading out the reply. It is the exact same as I received to a parliamentary question on 6 March 2024. If the Department of Health thinks I am going away, I am not. The reality is the Minister of State addressed the issue at the very end. The script did not address the realities of the issue.

I was amused that the officials mentioned the fact that social welfare recipients of a certain type receive an islander allowance. I persuaded the Minister for social welfare of the day, when I was Minister of the islands, to introduce that. It was progressive. They recognised, in the social welfare code, that there are extra costs living on an island but the reality is most of the people referred to in that part of the reply already have medical cards. Mainly, they are pensioners and, as the Minister of State will be aware, for those over 70 years, there is a much higher threshold. They are not the target group.

Many people on the islands are young and are working and we want many more young and working people on them. We want to create a viability to rear families on the islands.

Children up to a certain age get GP cards, but we need full medical cards, and we need it for the parents, for two reasons. The first is it is dearer to live on an island, irrespective of one's health condition. The second is it is way more expensive to access medical services, as the Minister of State can appreciate, if people have to travel from an island, get to the mainland and, as we have pointed out in many cases, and as the doctor pointed out, stay overnight or a second overnight to get to their appointment and back even though it might be only a day appointment.

There is probably another script - the Minister of State need not bother - but maybe we would deal with the issue rather than scripts. What I would hope he would say is that he will print out the transcript of this debate and make sure it gets into the right hands. This would be a cost-neutral exercise because by the time they take all these criteria and they do all this means-testing, the cost of giving the medical care would be well covered by the saving on very expensive bureaucracy.

See this speech in context