Patricia Ryan (Kildare South, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I, too, am disappointed that the Minister is not here this morning. I thank the Social Democrats for tabling this motion.

An ounce of prevention is worth a tonne of cure, as the old saying goes, especially when it comes to children’s dental health. Even the current Government’s failures are stark. More than 200,000 children are entitled to school dental screening appointments with public dentists but only half got appointments. The numbers include children who missed essential milestone screenings that would identify early signs of disease or more serious orthodontic problems. When these issues are missed, they get worse and require more serious intervention, all for the lack of an ounce of prevention.

Services cannot be offered if there are no staff to provide them. The Government’s recruitment embargo strikes again. Confirmation from the HSE that no additional staff will be appointed while the embargo remains is absolutely unacceptable. All these reasons add up to a huge backlog in screenings and appointments, with the number remaining in the thousands. Even the medical card scheme is floundering. It has lost half its 1,600 dentists since 2016, meaning fewer dentists, fewer appointments and more pressure on patients and parents to pay for private treatment, the alternative to which is leaving their children or themselves in pain. Parents and families are already being crucified by high rents, mortgages and huge cost-of-living pressures. They do not have spare resources to pay for expensive dental scares.

The Government’s relentless drive to privatise basic dental services is punishing those who can least afford them. These people are ordinary families. I will give a real example. I recently submitted a parliamentary question for a constituent whose daughter, who needed urgent orthodontic treatment, was told there was a minimum waiting period of four years but that if her parents could pay for the treatment, they would have it in several months. That is disgraceful. It is a real case of having to put your money where your mouth is, if you have money. A waiting period of four years for a child is not good enough.

At least let us not forget the special needs children who get general anaesthesia for treatment. That service has been severely limited since Saint James’s closed its clinic ten years ago. What is the Government going to do for the affected children? It says it will accept solutions. Well, I am going to give it some: address funding issues, recruit more dentists, strengthen and expand children’s public dental services, engage properly with the sector to reform the DTSS, and, more important, have a change of Government and put in Sinn Féin.

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