Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)

Sorry, it is not on the Minister’s desk yet. I apologise. The report to the Minister is imminent and the Cabinet will have to consider it. The report is on emergency healthcare access in the mid-west region. From replies to parliamentary questions that I and others have tabled, I know that initially HIQA was supposed to report to the Minister and then to Cabinet. Now, however, she has rightly asked it to factor in the recent ESRI report into its report. The report from the ESRI suggests that we need 40% more acute beds in this country by 2040. It is right that those two reports should be considered together in order that we might view public healthcare in the overall context.

In 1962, President John F Kennedy spoke at Rice University in Texas. He told those present, some of them guffawed and others laughed, that he would get men on the moon by the end of that decade. That happened in 1969. When he made that speech, he did not really have a full vision of how that was to happen. It was a policy aim, and he told his officials and everyone else to make it happen. Someone in the Department of Health is going to have a moon-landing moment. They will have to have it sooner rather than later because if we keep kicking the can down the road when it comes to public healthcare in the mid-west, what is needed will never happen.

During her time in the Department of Health - and I hope she has a very long and fulfilled political career - will the Minister make a moon-landing decision in September and apply it public healthcare in the mid-west region. When my mother started out nursing in the region in the 1980s there was accident and emergency care in Ennis, Nenagh, St. John’s Hospital, Barrington’s Hospital and the regional hospital in Limerick. There were five accident and emergency departments for a population of 300,000. There is now one to a population of 500,000. Something has gone fundamentally wrong here. It has happened over many years and it has to be fixed. Regardless of who makes the decision, and I hope it will be the Minister, we should be under no illusions. That hospital will not be built in 12 or 24 months' time. Public infrastructure in this country takes a huge amount of time to build, but it has to start with a political decision. It has to start with someone in a leadership role saying “Enough”. The ESRI has reported this, HIQA has reported that and unfortunately many people have lost their lives in hospital too, which is a body of evidence in its own right. That needs to be the guiding principle and the beacon that I hope will lead the Minister to make the decision in the autumn to improve access to public healthcare in the region. She has been down to see it. I have every faith she will do the right thing but I ask her to please, take the political decision. She may well be the Taoiseach when the ribbon is cut, because these things do not happen quickly. Regardless of that, however, the political decision to do this now has to happen this autumn. I trust the Minister will make it.

Like others, I pay tribute to the many people who work in our healthcare system. An Garda Síochána recently bemoaned the appearance of billboards outside some Garda stations. It happened at Limerick Garda station on Henry Street about six months ago. Melbourne police department is now recruiting, and it parked up a truck and trailer trying to lure gardaí to the land down under.

When the Minister, her colleagues in government, the Ceann Comhairle and others with political leadership roles in this country are overseas, they should spread the message that Ireland is open to recruitment in the health sphere. There are a lot of jobs that we cannot fill with our own graduates.

We need to look at attracting our nurses back home. I mentioned the point in the Chamber some months ago and the INMO did not like it. There has to be some carrot and stick, albeit more carrot than stick. We cannot train up the best and brightest people to become nurses and doctors and accept that they will spend their first six or seven years after qualifying in a sunny part of southern Australia. We have to have them here. Maybe after fulfilling five or six years of public contracts, they can break away and leave the country but they owe it to this country. It is not popular to say it but we will need that to fix our problems.

I thank the Minister and offer her my continued best wishes.

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