Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank my colleague Deputy Shortall for her work in bringing forward this motion. It is very disappointing that the Minister for Health is not here and that the second junior Minister who has just come to join this debate is not connected to the Department in any way. The response the Minister of State has just read out does not address many of the fundamental issues we have listed in the motion. It is simply a statement of what is being done now rather than what the Government is going to do to address the very serious issues we are raising. That shows the Government's complete lack of priority for this very important issue.

What is happening in the dental sector is symptomatic of this Government's hands-off approach. We see the same pattern time and again. The Government deregulates or fails to regulate, leaves it to the market, looks the other way and hopes nobody notices. We see it happening in housing, in our healthcare system and in infrastructure. We know the terrible impacts this approach has. Its impacts on the dental sector could not be starker. Some 104,000 children are on the waiting list for the school dental screening service. That is 104,000 children the Minister of State did not mention. There has been a 31% fall in the number of children being seen by public dentists over the course of five years and a 35% fall in the number of medical card patients being seen over the course of ten years. The number of dentists participating in the dental treatment scheme has fallen by 50% over the past ten years.

Much of the calamity in dentistry is a direct result of years of inadequate funding of our universities. Back in 2021, I received an email from a leaving certificate student who was desperate to study dentistry in UCC. She said that she was an extremely diligent student with very high aspirations for herself in the CAO courses she was going for. She wanted to study dentistry in UCC, which was 613 points the year prior, although she noted that, even if you got 613 points, you were not guaranteed a place, which she said was ludicrous. She went on to say that there were simply not enough places, especially given the vitalness of this career. She begged us to ensure there were adequate places in college that year for her sake and for her peers' sake. That worried leaving certificate student watched the points for dentistry rise to 625 that year. It has remained at 625 ever since. There is no space for as much as spelling mistake if you want to enter this essential field, which is in desperate need of dentists.

This example of the leaving certificate student from 2021 paints a picture of everything that is wrong with the Government's hands-off approach to dentistry. Universities are not adequately funded to provide the places we urgently need. This means they rely heavily on overseas students, who pay vast sums to study here in Ireland. These overseas students are much less likely to stay in Ireland after graduation, leaving an ever-growing hole in our workforce. In fact, 50% of the 300 student places in Cork and Dublin now go to overseas students. The same issue of underfunding caused UCC to recently announce a pause on the construction of its new dental school. In May 2022, the Irish Dental Association stated:

The pressure from dental patients will not and cannot be relieved until proper investment is made. We need the Government to intervene in the medical card scheme, public dentist recruitment and the training of dental graduates immediately before we reach crisis levels.

These urgent calls made in 2022 were ignored.

Will the Minister of State guarantee that all primary school children will receive their school-based appointments at the appropriate age by 2027? Will the Government strengthen and expand the capacity of public dental services for children and special care patients? Will it commit to providing the required funding in budget 2025 to put the medical card scheme on a sustainable footing? Will it commit to publishing the heads of the long-promised dentists Bill by September of this year? Will it address funding and capacity issues in dental education provision in the coming academic year? Will the Minister of State listen to the dentists who are working on the front line? Will he act on the issues we have raised in this motion?

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