Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Deputy Leader to the House. I have no difficulty in supporting the Order of Business. It is a good Order of Business and I particularly single out the issue of the Private Members’ slot today. I note all of the signatures on it and I look forward to engaging with it. It is a very important piece of work in regard to the legacy issue. I myself travelled to Belfast, as did other Oireachtas Members. I look forward to sharing a different perspective on some of those issues later on.

Senator Kyne is right about the validation of waiting lists. More than 900,000 people are waiting on the lists. I undertook with the Leader last week that I would bring this up on a monthly basis. She prompted me and suggested to me on the floor of the House that I would do it more often, so I did. I welcome that the Minister for Health will be making a statement later today on the funding and how he wishes to address these ongoing lists, which are shocking. They are an indictment of the health service. It is an outrage that people are waiting with tumours, looking for diagnostics, anxious and concerned.

I made contact with the National Treatment Purchase Fund again, as I undertook to do, and I want to share with the House a few issues. It just so happens that Senator Kyne spoke first and I did not realise he was going to speak on this issue. I will circulate a breakdown of the lists later on. The latest list for Galway University Hospital has 54,757 people, there are 31,325 on the list in Cork University Hospital and St. Vincent's University Hospital has 25,000 people on the waiting list, and these are outpatients only. Letterkenny Hospital has 18,772 waiting on the list and Beaumont Hospital has 24,095 outpatients on the list. It is shocking, it is appalling and it is a disgrace that this has gone on for so long. I was particularly concerned about the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital, with which I made contact only to be told there are 14,355 people looking for ophthalmic interventions. That is more than regional. That is a national speciality, so they are coming from all the regions and they cannot be broken down.

The list goes on and on. I decided I would share those figures with the House today. We have a serious concern and we need a debate on the waiting lists. To be fair to the Minister, who I support, I think he has a very hard and difficult job to do, but we need to see how we are going to address these lists. In this debate with the Minister, I want to hear who is going to validate the lists. There is a lot of confusion about double listing, double counting and people not turning up. This has to be addressed. They are genuine concerns. We need a debate urgently on how the Minister is specifically going to tackle these waiting lists and what is the role and function of the National Treatment Purchase Fund, separate from the Department, to administer and validate these lists. That is important.