Mattie McGrath on insurance gouging and defending private hospitals

I am delighted to speak in this bill and indeed I was in the chair when you were speaking yourself and I always listen to your speeches and learn from them and take them from your very succinct and to the pint and not afraid to call it speed to speed. And there are many aspects of this bill, you know, that we are enabling and putting funds out of stamp duty and other areas towards insurance companies for them to mitigate the charges to the payer, the people paying for the insurance premiums. But they might be doing that in some small way, but they are making high and dry the customers for the insurance. And we have regulators here for everything and anything and with the CRU and God knows what else. And why can't someone stop the insurance company from the gouging? And then a container is in the hospital, a private hospital. Now I have no hang-ups for private hospitals. I have been sick recently and I have been in a public hospital mainly in South Victoria general and at St Vincent's public I was there again last week. I had occasion to go to Whitfield last week and David Cornan was in the chair when I was speaking and he spoke earlier giving out about private. Whitfield was packed. So what kind of problems would we have if we didn't have the private hospitals? So we have to have a bit of both. A bit of both. And we have to have no ideological hang-ups like Sinn Féin have that you can't have private anything. They want to privatise everything and they are reading from the standard little red book, the communist book. They are against everything. They want nothing private. Whitfield was so efficient that morning, last Monday morning week and so busy. I know I paid a very princely sum on top of my £324 for consultation and £80 for next week. On top of my insurance. So I wonder why people have insurance but I have no idea how to hang up one way or not. But you did mention in your speech that you are so privileged to name one of them, I think it was Thomastown, it is a lovely district hospital. And you have a number of them and you are looking. I have no doubt that yourself and Bobby Elbert are not as far to retain those. We also had them in Temporary and we still have an excellent hospital in St. Therese in Tlawine. I couldn't say enough about it. My own mother died there. My cousins were treated as a palliative care. Hickway were bedibbling them, yes they were, but we got extra money, we were fighting. I have to mention the late Councillor Cairn Dunham, the Fianna Fáil councillor minister who taught me a lot about politics and he fought so hard for that. He was on the health committee with the late Jackie Hillie Ray and told many funny stories about travel around the south-western Helport. But it is an excellent hospital. Sister Arnie was there for years with Anne Halley Matron and now we have Anne Walsh and her team. I couldn't say enough about the Matron. They don't call her Matrons anymore, they have a fancy title because the Matrons are taboo. I say bring back the Matrons and the hospital will be clean, I am saying that always. But this lady, Anne Halley and her team, we couldn't ask for better. The care that elderly people are not so elderly to get there and then unfortunately we have two palliative care rooms now, which has been supported greatly by the community and lots of fundraising. But my God, they give it back in space and the care and the dignity that patients are cared for there as well. We also had St Vincent's in Tipperary, a town that closed, a long time ago under Fianna Fáil government closed the town. We had our ladies in Caxle which went to the hospital and then we had the Caxle and the Minister. I have to go back to St Bridges in Caxle, where the wonderful hospital was, I could be wrong with the number of beds, 18 I think, but three palliative care rooms there, supported by the council, by the people, and they haven't got back the funding yet either. So Minister, during COVID, Minister Donnelly decided he was secunding this hospital for COVID. Then they came back when they didn't want it for COVID, they said it wasn't fit for patients. I could never get an answer from you or from anybody else, how it was fit to treat patients with COVID because of space and separation, that's the reason we could have said. Why wasn't it fit for patients always? And the people of Canada can show East Waterford and indeed South Kilkenny plus Concola, use that hospital for palliative care. I know you've extra palliative care beds in Waterford City, but that's no good to people now from all over who have to go to that area who have to go to Clougheen or Tipperary Town to Clougheen and one of the two hospital beds as well. So it's more anti-racian, it's an awful travesty that our hospital was closed, and the funding that the families gave and raised, fundraiser, all kinds of issues, walks, hunts, bucket connections, and then when people died there with dignity, in palliative care with the wonderful nurses there, with the head nurse there, Miss Lundingham as well, who's now retired, and her husband was a senior officer in housing, two great public officials, Sean Lundingham. And the money that they raised at Manningham funeral and Bucket, when I went into the funeral, they collected for Ken Bridges Hospice Care, and that funding hasn't been appropriated back with it, more meetings and everything else. In Minnesota at the time, you promised there was going to be state-of-the-art, beside a diabetic centre clinic, in the big white elephant there, beside a monstrosity. The hospital in Carrington Shoes and Bridges will be there for centuries to come, it's a solid build, and they talk about flooding, it never flooded its life, and they built a cardboard box thing beside it, that's all it is, it's better put your fist to it if you had to. And here, Pesto, they built it two or three storeys with no lift. If you were building a house, you'd have to have a ramp into it, a wheelchair, and you'd get planning on it, but it would have been built with no lift, so we'd have to put a lift onto it. And you promised us, Minister, that there would be a state-of-the-art diabetic centre, but that's no longer. I probably meant to reply from the Minister of Health, that is no longer. So there's no diabetic services there now, so there's nothing there. We have oceans of officials, and I don't know how this goes on inside this cardboard box, that's what it is, a little better, but much better. The hospital is empty, full of, don't, nurse, locked, and it's sad. And it's sad to me, Minister, I don't want to be ahead with my agriculture over, I don't want to continue about it, but it's a travesty and injustice. That should be there for the people of Calicenture, and the communities of South Kilkenny, and indeed East Waterford, and more parts of Tipperary. So it's more on to a rush in. Minister, I move on then to the home helps, with people in hospitals in and there's blockages and they can't go home because they can't get home helps. But I've noticed that in the last 18 months, nobody will get a home help, sorry, nobody gets approved for home health care, but there's no one to do it. So the trouble in the hospital, we'll have help, then the home helps that are there, who I want to praise from the highest heaven, angels of mercy to work they do, flying around in their cars, on bad roads, and for little payment, and for great work to do, and the empathy and engagement they have with the patients. But that's all cut out now. You don't want them to buy the kit, no, no, no, this is all HSE policy now, they're not carers anymore. They're just in now telling what they're supposed to do, but they do it in spite of you. But you will approve it now, and then there's no one to be got for it, and people have to go back in the A&E's, talking up A&E's. Then A&E's, I firmly believe, and something must happen here, because I was in there one evening lately at a meeting, a special memorial service for people who have lost babies, and I met this gentleman at the door, he was off his head, and abusing everyone, and shouting at everyone. There should be some separate place for people who want to go in there, whether it's psychotic attacks, well not psychotic attacks, but whether it's out of drink or drugs, that they're outside there on security, trying to mind them, and upsetting everybody along the corridors. These people shouldn't be brought into A&E's. They should be brought into A&E's, that she brought up her cells, and detoxed her hose down her. I'll be accused now of being messed in this. There shouldn't be an A&E's that are causing untold grief to patients. I said one night that Vincent's A&E in the public hospital myself sat through it, and my God, so horrendous. On the nurses and the staff, and on elderly patients over there that are afraid of their life. There was a female patient that was doing this, but whoever wants to do that in a hospital. It's psychotic, it's something else, but if it's drugs or drink related, they shouldn't be in there, there should be a special place built for them, let them sleep it off with some limited supervision, and deal with them some way or other, because they're making life hell for the nurses, doctors, paramedics, and indeed the security staff. I don't know how many security staff are needed now in St. Rose's Hospital in London Mill. When my babies were born, or children were born, there was no security, and everyone was grand. But if people wanted to go in and misbehave and mistweet the receptionist, and the security, and the staff, and anybody else, even the poor man, the priest, they have a name on him, they won't come to me. So something must be done to tackle that, because it's going on every hospital, especially weekends. Now this was a Thursday night. No, it was a Friday night. It shouldn't be happening. So look, I hand it over to my colleague, Deputy Danny, anyway. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.