Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I dtosach, ba mhaith liom fáilte a chur roimh an chinnidh a rinne an Chúirt Uachtarach inné maidir le cearta oibre. I welcome the unanimous decision taken yesterday by the Supreme Court on the right to work of people seeking asylum. We need to get real about the issue of asylum. We also need to look at the right of people in that system to education. We certainly need to look at scrapping direct provision and I want to see us debate that again as soon as possible.

I wish to raise a very distressing issue this morning. It is in respect of lives being put at risk in rural areas due to a lack of ambulance services. It is not I who is saying this. A local GP in Connemara has highlighted this issue due to frustration. Last Saturday night, he was called at 11.30 p.m. A call was placed for an emergency, blue light ambulance. This was for a potentially life-threatening acute illness in a 60 year old man. If an ambulance had been based in Carraroe, it would have been with the gentleman in approximately ten minutes. Unfortunately, the doctor says, as is frequently the case, no ambulance staff were available in Carraroe and the estimated arrival time for the ambulance was 57 minutes. He goes on to outline the dangers of that and the fact he felt afraid that the patient would die at the side of the road. Thankfully, he did not. On another occasion last year, however, the response time was 120 minutes and, on a different occasion, an ambulance had to come from Roscommon to Carraroe, which is totally and utterly unacceptable.

I have raised these issues in this House on an ongoing basis since I was elected in 2011. I have got the deaf ear from every Minister who has ever come in to discuss them. I know that people in Leenane in north Connemara have raised this issue as well. They have had meetings with the Minister, Deputy Harris. The Minister gave them a lovely hearing and was very concerned with their issues but fobbed them off again to the National Ambulance Service. The Ministers, Deputy Harris, Deputy Varadkar and, the former Deputy, now Senator Reilly, all washed their hands of this issue. When is the Government going to get real and realise that this is a life and death issue? In 2015, for example, one of our proposals was to put €6 million from the budget aside to make eight more ambulances and crews available throughout the country. That was the same year in which €6.5 million was spent on setting up the administrative system for the water conservation grant, which never happened.The Government has certain priorities in the way it is spending money, but it is certainly not spending it on rural ambulance services, which it needs to do. This is a life and death issue. There has been an outcry among GPs on this and other issues. We need a debate about rural ambulance services and health services in rural areas.