Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the OPW on the wonderful restoration of this room. I hope our intellectual prowess and argument can parallel it. However, I do not particularly like the front door to the building. It reminds of a funereal door, into a very modern undertakers. We have lost the clink and clitch of the mahogany door and I have written to the OPW, and to the ushers, about it. Our own room here is wonderful and I am glad to be back in it.

I wish to raise an issue I raised in the last semester, and which is coming to fruition now. It concerns healthcare workers. The IMO has sent out statistics that are quite frightening, such as that we have the lowest number of medical specialists in the EU; 520 consultant posts not filled; outpatient lists exceeding 500,000; 50% of health specialists due to retire in the next five years; one quarter of GPs due to retire; and unprecedented levels of emigration among our newly qualified doctors. This is extremely serious. We can talk about Brexit all we like, and we can talk about what Boris Johnson is and is not doing at the High Court and the Supreme Court, but we have a serious problem in the health area, especially as we get older. I ask the Leader to invite the Minister for Health to come into the House. We need to attend to a lot of these problems with our hospitals, not just in the great city of Dublin or urban areas like Limerick and Galway but all over Ireland.These are serious problems reflecting what is happening in our health sector. It goes back to the issue of healthcare workers, the shortage of critical skills and the very people we need to mind our elder population not being allowed to get visas to work in Ireland. I wanted to put that on the record. I ask the Leader to arrange for the Minister for Health to come into the House to address those issues.