Results 15,981-16,000 of 40,330 for speaker:Leo Varadkar
- Order of Business (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: I am committed to having a referendum in May or June if possible. However, I answered the Deputy's question in my previous reply. Before members of the public vote in a referendum, they will want to have some indication as to what legislation this House will enact if the eighth amendment is repealed. As the Deputy is aware, if the amendment was repealed tomorrow, it would not change the...
- Order of Business (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: People would like to see, at the very least, a detailed, general scheme in order that they might have some understanding as to what might be the new law. We need to check the position. The Citizens' Assembly differed from the all-party committee as to whether there needs to be an enabling provision which makes it clear that only the Oireachtas can make the law on this issue because...
- Order of Business (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: I do not have any information on that particular contact but I will ask the Minister for Health to respond to the Deputy.
- Order of Business (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: The Government and the Cabinet have not yet made a decision on the issue. I am keen to hear people's views. We had a good discussion at the Cabinet last week. I also attended a meeting yesterday of my parliamentary party which lasted for five hours to hear views across the parliamentary party on the issue. There will be a debate on it in the Dáil and the Seanad in the next couple of...
- Order of Business (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: With the greatest of respect to the Deputy, he is one of the champion filibusters in the House.
- Order of Business (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: I hope he will not filibuster on this or any other legislation in 2018.
- Order of Business (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: The process of having a Citizens' Assembly, referring matters to an Oireachtas committee and making decisions at the Cabinet and in this House was established by the Government. 3 o’clock Despite what other people may think, it was never about delaying tactics or long-fingering this issue. I do not want to long finger it either.
- Order of Business (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: It will be published this month. The Minister for Health has not brought it to Cabinet yet but he intends to do so in the next week or two. As Deputy Adams correctly pointed out, it has been widely leaked to the newspapers. The content should come as no surprise to anyone.
- Order of Business (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: It proposes, alongside reforms to our health service, that we will need 2,500 additional acute beds between now and 2021. I should repeat what I said. The Government did not need a bed capacity review report to tell it that we need additional beds in hospitals. We have been increasing the number of beds for the past two years at the rate of approximately 150 to 200 a year. That work was...
- Leaders' Questions (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: I am informed that the enrolment of the school for 2017 and 2018 is 97 pupils. That represents a 28% increase over the past five years, so this is clearly an expanding school - with a growing number of pupils - that is responding to the needs that exist in the local community. In terms of the Department's capital budget, its first priority when it comes to school building is what it has to...
- Leaders' Questions (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: The Government's aim is to ensure that every child, especially those with special educational needs, can fulfil his or her potential and avail of all of the educational opportunities available to him or her. During the worst years of the recession when public spending was cut across the board, it was one of the areas which was protected from spending reductions. In fact, resources grew...
- Leaders' Questions (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: There will also be more staff and money. The increase in the number of beds is happening. I think the figure for this year is 190 additional beds. We do not yet have a figure for next year, but we are working on it as part of the capital plan. There will be more beds this year, as there were last year and the year before. To give the Deputy the figures - in 2017 the number of inpatient...
- Leaders' Questions (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: More than 1,200 inpatient beds were taken out of the system by previous Governments-----
- Leaders' Questions (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: -----which involved Fianna Fáil, the Progressive Democrats and the Green Party.
- Leaders' Questions (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: We are reversing that trend.
- Leaders' Questions (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: We have more staff in the health service. I think the number is now 110,000, up by 10,000 on the figure five years ago. Notwithstanding the problems we are having in recruitment, we now have nearly 10,000 doctors working in the public health service and more consultants than ever before.
- Leaders' Questions (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: The figure will increase. We have about 1,500 or 2,000 more nurses than we had two years ago. Therefore, there are more beds and staff. There is also more money and there will be more beds, staff and money.
- Leaders' Questions (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: The point the Government and I continuously make is not that we do not need more resources but that more resources on their own are clearly not enough. Increased resources have not produced the results we want.
- Leaders' Questions (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: We do not have any plan to close any emergency department in the State, not least because to do so properly, one would need to make sure patients would be adequately provided for in the next centre, the new hospital or the adjoining hospital and that they would have the capacity to deal with the additional workload. We saw the difficulties faced by St. Vincent's University Hospital when St....
- Leaders' Questions (16 Jan 2018)
Leo Varadkar: When it comes to consultants, I think it was the Hanly report that recommended we needed about 4,000. As that is probably a little out of date at this stage, we will need to update it also. It takes a long time to train a consultant and having trained so long, a lot of them do not want to do certain jobs. We need to be realistic about how many we can recruit on an ongoing basis and...