Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I wish the Minister the best of luck with her new brief. It is important she succeeds for the sake of hundreds of thousands of people who rely on the health service every year and indeed for the workers who provide the healthcare. I apologise in advance that I will need to leave because I am simultaneously participating in the Dáil reform committee and therefore I will not be here for any response the Minister might make, but I will look at the transcript.

I believe the State has an obligation to provide cradle-to-grave healthcare. When we have a two-tier system, there is a fundamental problem in providing that for everybody as a matter of right, which they should have. That needs to be addressed. It is obscene, frankly. The quality of healthcare and the speed at which people get it is dependent on whether they have private health insurance. I hope we have a commitment that that will change and change soon. There has been a long-standing commitment that we should change it but nothing actually happens. The truth is those who can afford to go to the Blackrock Clinic, the Mater Private or a very expensive nursing home are in a different category from the people who cannot afford those things. That is fundamentally wrong and has to change.

Regarding the section 39 issue, with people living longer and so on, the fact that huge numbers of our elderly, vulnerable and people with disabilities are in many cases dependent on workers where the State has outsourced its responsibility to charity organisations or companies makes it impossible to actually deliver on a sustained, fair and consistent basis the sort of service they need. I cite our constituency as an example. Dún Laoghaire Home Care Services announced recently that it was ceasing to function. During the election campaign, I met workers who worked for it for years. They were absolutely distraught as to what was going to happen to them and their clients. Their clients were up the walls about it too. That should not happen. There is no way the services or the employment of the workers working in those services should be dependent on whether a charity or company decides it can trade. That is absolutely crazy. Those workers should be in the same position as other people directly employed by the HSE. They should be employed by the HSE in a single universal healthcare system - from the cradle to the grave. The people for whom they care should not have to worry and be anxious as to whether the service will be there next week or next month, but that is what is actually happening. That needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.

Virtually every healthcare worker in this country has been balloted for industrial action because of the pay and numbers strategy. The first people to raise that with me were workers at St. Michael's Hospital in our constituency. Then people from Loughlinstown contacted me and then people from multiple other hospitals, all saying the same thing. They cannot recruit, replace and cover the work that needs to be done because of pay and numbers. It has to be scrapped.

See this speech in context