Micheál Martin (Cork South-Central, Fianna Fail)

First of all, Deputy, we have had the biggest expansion of access to free GP care in the history of the State, which the Deputy did not reference in his presentation on primary care services. It is the biggest expansion of access to free GP care in the history the State. Some 2.3 million people are now eligible in this country for free GP care. I would ask the Deputy to forward me the details of the individual cases he instanced.

The Deputy mentioned a recruitment embargo. There has been no recruitment embargo. We do need to get a bit real here. We have had close to 30,000 extra people in our health service in the last five years and the Deputy talks about an embargo. Six thousand more will be employed in 2025 and thousands more will be employed next year. These will be additional.

Maybe a more pertinent question to ask is whether we are getting the outputs for the significant investment that has gone into health over the last five years.

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