Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to bring up two issues that come up all too regularly in this Chamber, unfortunately, namely, the health service and housing. I will start with the health service and the drastic news of a further extended recruitment freeze across our major hospitals. We are already in crisis. I met workers from University Hospital Limerick a couple of weeks back and they told me they fully expect the hospital to effectively turn into a nursing home through the winter because of the freeze on home helps and the fact there are no available paths out of the hospital for many patients at the moment. On top of this, I also should mention that the staff turnover rate at University Hospital Limerick is 21%. Right now, when one in five staff are leaving, they cannot be replaced. They are already understaffed. We are already short 800 doctors in the service across the Twenty-six Counties. This is a disastrous decision and the latest sign of the complete failure on the part of the Minister for Health. A decision to underfund the health service is not just morally wrong, it is absolutely critical in terms of saving lives. To find your Government in a position where this is happening after three and a half years, I do not blame Mr. Bernard Gloster at all, I blame the Government for taking the deliberate decision to underfund the health service. The workers I spoke to at the University Hospital Limerick before this announcement last Friday were already at their wits' end in terms of understaffing and the challenges of getting new staff in. The message this sends to the nurses and doctors overseas is effectively that there is no point in trying to come back here, as there is a freeze on now. It makes no sense on so many levels and we need an urgent debate on the issue.

The second issue is housing. I will inform the House that the cost of rents in Limerick went up by 16% in one 12-month period. Those are the latest figures from Daft.ie. It is a consistent record of failure again by this Government. Sinn Féin has consistently called for a ban on rent increases and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have consistently refused to take that on board. We now have a position where it costs €1,800 for a three-bedroom house in Limerick. What working families can afford that? It makes life impossible for them to both afford rent and actually save any money towards buying a house of their own. It is not as if we have not been saying this for years; we have. Yet the Government has consistently felt that, no, it cannot interfere with the market and will leave it be and consistently, year after year and month after month, the situation has got worse. Now, we have young people not being able to leave their parents' houses and young people making decisions to emigrate because of the complete failure and breakdown of housing across our State. That is a 16% increase in one year and the latest abject figures of failure, on top of the horrendous increase in homelessness figures, which has been a feature of this Government from the very start. Again, I call for an urgent debate.