Kathryn Reilly (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. A plethora of issues and challenges for young people's health, such as the obesity crisis, are emerging these days. Dental health is just as much an essential issue when it comes to ensuring the future well-being of our citizens. As we all know, dental complications can lead to serious illness and disease. If the Government is serious about children and their health, it must ensure that dangers are minimised, not just for patient health but also for the savings this could bring to the cost of dental services provision in the longer term if problems are detected and dealt with at an earlier stage.

The State provides free dental services to persons under 16 years of age. Parents should be able to expect their children's teeth to be examined in second, fourth and sixth class. However, with delays in dentist visits, many children may not be seen until they are 11 or 12 years of age. By that stage, the priority will be orthodontic work. Seeing a dentist for the first time at 12 years of age or so could be too late to stop major problems with decay and gum disease. It is tantamount to closing the door after the horse has bolted. Reductions in staff and funding have led to cutbacks in the service in recent years. In my county, Cavan, this has been an issue of grave concern to many families. The local council has raised the issue with the HSE on several occasions. Collectively, counties Cavan and Monaghan are three to five years behind other counties in terms of dentists visiting primary schools. This is unacceptable.

Even though there are supposed to be screening programmes and services for persons under 16 years of age, the reality is that this is not happening. The plight of children and young adults with dental disease is being exacerbated by this failure of the HSE to meet its obligations to children to provide primary school dental services. The failure to provide timely screening and treatment of simple problems or early onset of dental disease causes severe deterioration which then requires more complex remedial treatments. The State services often cannot provide these and many families simply cannot afford them, particularly given current economic circumstances. This is the reality.

From previous ministerial responses to this issue when raised by other Deputies and Senators, I understand that a three-year project is under way to develop a new national oral health policy. It has been acknowledged that despite the introduction of the 1994 dental health action plan, inequalities remain in the population's oral health. The vulnerability of some groups linked to low income or disabilities is of particular concern. The severe delays in dentists visiting primary schools are having a very detrimental effect on children's oral health in their formative years. Why are there such delays and problems with dentists visiting primary schools and what is being done to address this?