David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This time last year when I took to my feet, I warned that the Government's funding of the health service was chaotic. I said that the health service would need a very significant bailout, in the region of €1.5 billion at least and possibly higher. I was joined in this by the head of the HSE but, as the Minister might recall, there was serious pushback from the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and the Minister for public expenditure and reform who said that we were alarmist, that we were wrong and that the health service would not need that level of additional funding, only for in the summer economic statement the Government having to come in to bail out the health service with €1.5 billion to make up for what we had warned the Minister about in recent years.

Almost all of the €3 billion that has been announced as so-called additional funding for the health services is, as the Minister knows, money for the health service to stand still. We are playing catch-up for years of not funding existing levels of service, ELS. None of this, or very little of it, will go towards new measures. In fact, the Minister only secured €120 million in additional current expenditure beyond what was already committed for new measures. I know the Minister says he is repurposing money elsewhere from ELS and from money that goes from non-core to core and so on to allow for new measures but in reality, the current additional allocation according to the Government's own expenditure booklet is €120 million. That is a fact. That is what is in the Government's booklet, as presented on budget day.

Worse than that, when I took to my feet last year, I warned the Minister about not funding the national cancer strategy. Therefore, I welcome the funding this year, of course. However, last year the Minister was not in a position to do that because he was left naked without any additional funding at all and there was very little scope for any new measures. That is the reality of how the Government chaotically funded the health service last year. It has been stop-start funding for all of these national strategies. It was the same with new money for new drugs and the Minister had to go and scramble to find money from savings elsewhere to save face.

For all the talk about reducing waiting lists, they have barely come down. I acknowledge that the number of long waiters has come down, but the number of people waiting for care has pretty much remained static - there is about a 4% drop. Community waiting lists have gone up by about 50%. They are hidden waiting lists and we have to drag that information out of the Government almost on a quarterly basis because are not published. Many children with disabilities cannot get access to services. The Minister of State with responsibility for mental health talks about additional funding where she includes ELS money while presenting that as new money. The actual additional money for new measures for mental health is a drop in the ocean compared with what is needed to deal with all the challenges we have in mental health.

We have not turned the corner on the trolley crisis, far from it. The trolley crisis is now an all-year-round problem and not just in Limerick but in many hospitals. We should rightly point to the exemplars of hospitals that have done well, but many hospitals have not and much of this is down to capacity.

I welcome, as I always do, additional funding that goes into the health system. I welcome every single euro of additional funding in the budget that goes into providing better healthcare services. However, I must also call out the failure in how the Government has chaotically funded the health service over recent years, how it has been forced to play catch-up at a very expensive time by way of having to pony up €2.5 billion just for the health service to stand still because of the failures of the Government and the failures of the Government party leaders to property support the health service.

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