David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The number of patients on hospital trolleys in the month of January alone was 13,972. This is quite phenomenal and broke all records. It seems the only thing the Government is good at when it comes to health, housing and other areas is breaking records for all the wrong reasons. All of the people left on hospital trolleys, and others sitting in chairs and corridors in emergency departments, are people who are not being treated with dignity and not being treated with respect. It is the same for the staff, who are working in very difficult circumstances. Some of those circumstances have often been described as war zones because of how chaotic they are. I have been in touch with many nurses in December, January and now into February, and they say there has been no let up.

You would imagine, given all of these well-rehearsed crises and all of the debates we have had in the House on health, housing, the cost of living and many of these issues, that the Government would come forward with real plans with ambition and detail in its programme for Government. Of course, we were all bitterly disappointed. Never have I seen a document so vague when it comes to healthcare. We produced a very comprehensive plan. The Government can dismiss our plans all it wants but they were based on what is practical, realistic, deliverable and necessary to transform healthcare, to take patients off trolleys and put them into beds, to make sure people can have timely access to a GP, to make sure children with disabilities get access to the services they need, to make sure children with scoliosis get the care they need in a timely fashion, and to make sure people do not have their procedures cancelled and are not waiting for years on end for basic care.

Community waiting lists have increased, as have mental health waiting lists. Acute hospital waiting lists have remained static. The national children's hospital has still not been built. All there is in the programme for Government on the national children's hospital is laughable. There is one line, "Open the National Children’s Hospital". There is no sense of detail, timescale, urgency or recognition of all of the challenges. It just states "Open the National Children’s Hospital".

There is a long list of measures which I found laughable as somebody who takes my responsibility as health spokesperson very seriously. I set out in detail what needs to be done. For example, on workforce planning we said we would hire 40,000 additional health staff over five years. What was in the programme for Government? There is one line on hiring more doctors, nurses and healthcare specialists. If I produced, that I would be laughed out of the room by the Government and those in the media. "Hire" could mean one, 50 or 100. What we do know, and we can judge the Government on its record, is that it put in place an embargo and a pay and numbers strategy that has now resulted in the potential for industrial action by healthcare trade unions due to the mess the Government has made of it.

The programme for Government references training more healthcare professionals. This is the Government's big workforce plan. There is one line on training more healthcare professionals. We produced very detailed proposals on a 50% increase in training places in some areas and a 100% increase in others where it is necessary, additional measures to support GPs and directly hiring GPs. We provided the numbers, the funding and the detail, again because we take our job seriously and we want to fix the problems in healthcare. The best the Government could come up with was to train more doctors and nurses. In reality, if we are being serious, the new Minister for Health and whoever was negotiating for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael did not write the programme for Government. It was written primarily by civil servants in the Department of Health and the head of the HSE. It is so embarrassing in lacking ambition and detail that in reality what it displays is that the Government has no plan. It has no vision or idea. It depended on civil servants to give it something to put in the programme for Government when, in fact, it had no ideas or vision of its own. This is no surprise to me given the election manifestos the two parties produced on health, which were threadbare when it came to new ideas.

We will not see a change in healthcare. We will not see the trolley crisis dealt with. People are waiting far too long to access healthcare. They are waiting longer than ever to access a GP. Some people, particularly medical card holders, cannot even access a dentist because they have left the scheme due to inadequacies and failures on the Government's part. Children with disabilities and older people cannot get access to care in their home. All of these are real challenges that impact on the people we collectively represent. Unfortunately, the programme for Government has more of the same and more failure instead of what we in Sinn Féin produced, which is a plan that would tackle these problems.

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