David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

-----with regard to senior Ministers not coming in. Particularly when people are putting forward very substantial motions, the senior Minister should be here. That is what Opposition time is for. Time and again we are seeing it where a junior Minister is sent in and senior Ministers seem to think it is not their role, but it is. It is their job to be here and to answer the questions that are being put.

Looking at all of the issues in this motion, and I have been raising some of these issues myself over recent weeks and months, it is all down to Government failure. The first one is the children who are deemed eligible for school dental screening - more than 200,000 children. Because of failure on the part of the Government to put the capacity into the public system to allow us to have the dentists working in the system to do the screening, half of those children are not getting access to that dental screening. We know that for all of those children who do not get screening, there is a higher risk of poor oral dental care. Their teeth and condition could deteriorate. Even for those who get the screening and it is captured in the public system, we know they are waiting far too long for access to orthodontic care and treatment. It is a clear failure on the part of the Government where 200,000 children are deemed eligible but only half of them are receiving the treatment. The Minister of State must take full responsibility for that because it is on him, it is on the senior Minister and it is on the Government.

On the dental treatment service scheme, and I will be very deliberate when I say this, the collapse of that scheme is an absolute disgrace. There have been countless Dáil motions on this from multiple different political parties in the Opposition time and again calling out the Government on this. If this was in any other area and if it was not for medical card patients, this would be sorted. I believe there is a real class element to this by just allowing people who have a medical card, who need access to dental services, to go without because it involves medical card patients. It is absolutely unacceptable. This has been a problem for far too long and the Minister has not addressed or fixed it. We had the Irish Dental Association appear before the Oireachtas Committee on Health last week and it spelt out again chapter and verse all of the problems that led to the collapse of that scheme. Of course, there is responsibility on dentists as well - of course there is - but there is a bigger responsibility on the Government and it has failed to deal with it. I have seen representatives from my party using Topical Issue Matters and promised legislation time to raise the fact that, in their constituencies, dentists are not signed up to the scheme, the scheme has collapsed, and medical card patients who are registered for the scheme have either to pay for the treatment or to wait longer to get access to very basic dental care. Again, this is a clear Government failure where the senior Minister is not here to answer all of the questions.

The third issue is regulation. How in God's name have we allowed a situation to develop but also to be sustained for so long when we have the regulators calling for more power in this area? I have met members of the Dental Council of Ireland several times and they actually drafted legislation. They did the work for the Minister and for the Government and yet the Government has not moved or delivered on this. We have very serious problems in the registration of dentistry. It has been highlighted time and again. I have seen "RTÉ Investigates" programmes on it, the media have raised it and everybody seems to want to deal with it except the people who can deal with it, the Department, the HSE, but, more importantly, the Government.

All of the failures in this motion today are Government failures, but there are solutions. The first thing you do is lift the recruitment embargo. When the HSE is responding to parliamentary questions from the Opposition saying it cannot recruit dentists other than consultants because of the recruitment embargo, there is nobody else for me to point the finger at than the Minister of State, sitting where he is because the senior Minister is not here. The Government needs to lift that embargo because it is dangerous, counterproductive and it is absolute madness that, at a time of crisis in healthcare, when children, in this instance, cannot get access to dental screening, the Government has a recruitment embargo in place which prevents, blocks and prohibits the HSE from recruiting the staff we need to deal with it. Wake up, do your job and I hope that, when we are putting forward Private Members' motions again on healthcare, the Minister for Health comes in and takes it because it is happening far too often that senior Ministers are not coming in. It is unacceptable.

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