Richard Boyd Barrett: Demands End to Two-Tier Health System

Minister, the best of luck with your new brief. It's important you succeed for the sake of hundreds of thousands of people who rely on the health service every year and, indeed, for the workers who provide the health care. I want to apologise in advance that I have to go to... I'm simultaneously participating in the Dáil Reform Committee. So I won't be here for any response you might make, but I'll look at the transcript afterwards. In the short time available to me, I just want to say this. I believe in cradle-to-the-grave health care. I believe the state has an obligation to provide that. I think there's a fundamental problem providing that for everybody as a matter of right, which they should have, when you have a two-tier system. And I think that needs to be addressed. I think it's obscene, frankly, that the quality of health care, speed at which you get it, is dependent on whether you have private health insurance or not. Okay? So I hope we have a commitment that that's going to change. And change soon. Because there's been a long-standing commitment that we should change it, but nothing actually happens. And the truth is, if you can afford to go to the BlackRock Clinic or the matter private or a very expensive nursing home, you're in a different category to the people who can't afford those things. And that has to change. It's fundamentally wrong. Secondly, I think the Section 39 issue, if we're talking about older people, vulnerable people, living longer and so on, the fact that huge numbers of our elderly and vulnerable and people with disabilities are in many cases dependent on workers where the state has outsourced their responsibilities to charity organisations or companies, makes it impossible to actually deliver on a sustained and fair and consistent basis the sort of services they need. I cite our own constituency as an example. Delirie Home Care Services announced recently that they were ceasing to function. During the election, I met workers who'd worked for them for years, absolutely distraught. What's happening? What's going to happen to us? What's going to happen to our clients? And their clients up the walls about it too. That shouldn't happen. There's no way the services or the employment of the workers who work in their services should be dependent on whether a charity or company decides it can trade or not. That's absolutely crazy. Those workers should be in the same position as other people directly employed by the HSE. They should be employed by the HSE in a single, universal, healthcare system cradled to the grave. And the people for whom they care should not have to worry and be anxious as to whether the service will be there next week or next month. But that's what's actually happening. That needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency. Very lastly, Minister, virtually every healthcare worker in this country has balloted for industrial action because of the pay and number strategy. The first people to raise that with me were workers in St. Michael's Hospital in our constituency. And then people from Lockwood Sound contacted me and then people and then people from multiple other hospitals all saying the same thing. They can't recruit, replace, cover the work that needs to be done because of pay and numbers. It has to be scrapped. Okay, Gourav Mille Malga to Dishirat.