Joe Conway (Independent)

This motion is very timely in that it address the géarghá mór i stádas na fiaclóireachta atá sa tír seo. There is a big crisis in dental care across the country. As a former primary school principal, even when I was in the classroom, I noted year on year a deterioration in the level of service that children got from the school dental service. At this stage, many children go through primary school and do not get to visit a dentist at all or are not seen at all. On my travels, I have noticed that the state of the dental hardware, namely teeth, of teenagers, young adults and people entering their 30s who have been recipients of dental care in Ireland is oftentimes pretty shocking in comparison with that of their European counterparts. That is the state of the nation from a dental point of view and from the perspective of young people. Forget about the older cohorts because, basically, the state of their teeth is basically just care on the tear that has been done during their lives.On the young people who are remediable, the impact of the Irish dental profession and the Irish dental service is lamentable. We just have to look at the smiles. Often, we will see youngsters in Ireland hiding their smiles because they are so embarrassed about the array of their teeth that they do not want to do the most human and natural thing to a young person, which is to display their personality and jollity through the openness of their smiles. What they have in their mouths is a crowded misalignment of their teeth. This is not down to anything they do, but down to a very poor lack of care.

We are addressing a problem here today, but if the Minister of State and his colleagues will forgive me - it is very good that we have this motion here - I must ask if there is not a tad of the burglar ringing the gardaí here. The Minister of State's party has been in government for 14 years and his colleagues are bringing forward this motion today. I think this is perhaps a little rich because it shows to me that somewhere along the line there is a dismal lack of planning. We all saw this problem years and years ago, but it is 14 years later that we are standing up and calling out the fact that somebody has been asleep at the wheel on this problem. What I want to decry is that we have this system that deals with our children and their health and, as the old cliché goes, the dogs in the street are barking out that there is a problem. Nobody, however, seems to get their act together until it becomes dismally critical before they begin to address it. This is a horrible state of affairs.

I spoke here last week about balanced regional development. I talked about the way the South East Technological University, SETU, is being effectively discriminated against because of a lack of funding. That university would love to have a dental faculty and it would offer to host it. Given the standard of living in the south east, God help us down there, we would be able to offer to host that faculty much more cheaply than the centres of excellence we already have. As for the young graduates who might come out of such a faculty, be it in Cork, Dublin or Waterford, I refer to us being able to incentivise Irish kids - I know there are implications in relation to the EU and the equality of student opportunities - to go in and take dentistry as a noble and very remunerative profession, which it is and we all know it is because most of us have to pay for our dentistry and we know what it costs. We could incentivise the profession by locking the graduates who come out of dentistry into a commitment to the State for five or ten years or whatever could be negotiable. Then we would not have this talent drain we see afflicting the medical and dental professions. It is just pure common sense. If we train our own dentists, then surely to God we should get the benefit of training them. I think this is self-evident.

Our spokespeople have talked about a baffling problem, ten-year backlogs and some children never being seen. I absolutely echo that as someone who was working with kids all my life. It is an analysis that is almost impossible to make because it is so neglectful. I refer not alone to dental hygiene but also the implications for heart problems later in life. This is, essentially, at the nub of human health. Depending on what league table you are looking at, whether it is from the World Bank or other organisations, we are either the third or fourth most wealthy nation in the world per capita. If we cannot afford our children basic and good healthcare, then we are failing our children and our future generations.