Richard Boyd Barrett warns of ambulance staffing crisis

The poor oppressed government backbenchers are getting plenty of opportunities to speak today, but as of tomorrow they will have half the time to raise important issues, like how we respond to storms, despite your claims you are standing up for their rights. One group that we will not be able to talk about as much are the ambulance drivers, who are absolutely critical in the National Ambulance Service. These should be warnings about having the capacity to respond to emergencies where lives can be at risk. Before I met with representatives of the National Ambulance Service workers and they said we for example have about half of the ambulance cover that Scotland has, a similar population, that there is not enough paramedics, so even if ambulances get there on time they do not have the paramedics to deal with it. There are also threats to the helicopter emergency medical service because of lack of staffing and specifically to the emerging threat team because of lack of funding and lack of staffing by your government. So are you going to engage with the representatives of the National Ambulance Service and the unions who actually provide the emergency services and ensure they have the proper funding, staffing, infrastructure and cover to save lives when we have emergencies? Thank you. Deputy Paul Murphy. Thanks. One interesting positive outcome of the storm, if one could even say that, is the degree to which communities rallied and there's a very strong community resilience in Ireland. We now need to institutionalise that a bit more and by that I mean we need to resource communities. There was a tremendous community focal point there and they had a tremendous coordination and used all the various schemes from the rural social scheme to the solidarity payment, the grant scheme and they used that through the purchase of vans out of one scheme through all the social workers to get food to people living in remote areas. So we need and then the GA clubs and the soccer clubs, they need to be provided I think with generators. We need to do that in a programmed way, we can't do it to everybody, but if there's an identifiable focal point in any given community, some of them didn't have generators and by the grace of God they got back power quickly so they could then make the facility available to the public. So I think we need to just give, develop a support scheme probably to a community rural affairs that would enable us to strategically place essential sort of provisions for those communities which would enable there to be a focal hub that people could come to for showering, for charging their phones, for contact and so on like that. So that's something I'm very keen to see developed. In terms of the defence forces, they're brought in by the civil authority. They can only come in if they're asked by the local authorities. Local authorities lead on the ground and local authorities are under the plan and there is a national emergency plan, there's a national emergency planning structure and every county has to have an emergency plan formulated and published. We do tend to get different responses from different local authorities in different areas, I have to say, and we've got to work to try and make that more uniform into the future. On the ambulance network, again, that's an ongoing issue not just in terms of the context of the storm, but again I will talk to the Minister for Health in respect of that. I was at the recent launch of the helicopter emergency service in the south and significant progress has been made in relation to that. I'm aware there's staffing issues but I hope negotiations can resolve that. We've moved from a monocultural form of forestry and more recent plans are much more into broadleaf trees and a proper mixture. We do need commercial forestry as well. We do need timber. I would argue that timber frame housing is more climate friendly than cement and so on. So we do need a better balance. So we can't just ridicule forestry for profit. We do need a commercial forestry sector. We also need greater biodiversity, greater varied plantations of trees and I'm very keen on that and I think a very comprehensive scheme has been announced last year. Very significant grants available to farmers in particular, but I think farmers obviously have traditional, you know, the main commodities and dairy and beef and the rest of it and it's not as easy to move people over to forestry, but that work will continue. I think I've exhausted as much as I can do that. Thank you.