Jerry Buttimer (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will begin with a text message I received this morning from a friend who worked in Kyiv and who I had the pleasure of meeting when I was an election monitor. It reads as follows:

Talking with all my co-workers, it's like 1939-1941...trying to flee West, jumping on trains, finding cars, leaving wives and kids at the border..the amount of destruction to infrastructure - horrible.

That is from a man who worked with the World Bank in Kyiv until last autumn. We stand with Ukraine today. The suggestion of Senator McGahon, endorsed by Senator Conway, that we invite Commissioner McGuinness to the House should be given serious consideration.

I ask for a debate on the HSE national service plan, a service plan amounting to €20.7 billion that our good friends in Sinn Féin never acknowledge. To be fair to Senators Gavan and Maria Byrne, they come in here and talk about the problems at University Hospital Limerick regularly but there is something fundamentally wrong with our health service when the biggest ever budget of €20.7 billion, plus an additional €350 million for a 2022 waiting list action plan, is not addressing the problems. There is something fundamentally wrong with the HSE and it needs to be addressed. All of us want to see waiting lists reduced, hospital bed capacity increased, and home care and social care packages enhanced and increased. We need an urgent debate, not just about Sláintecare or universal healthcare, but about putting the patient, the person who needs care, at the core of what we do in our health service. I ask that we have that debate as a matter of extreme urgency. Indeed, we should have a rolling debate on a series of issues related to healthcare and HSE.