Richard Boyd Barrett urges action over Cushle closure amid protest

I heard you respond to the question about Cushle, the holiday centre in Roscommon, mentioning that you had responded previously, I didn't hear your response, but I wonder given the size of the protest outside and the fact that wheelchair users and their families and supporters have come in very large numbers outside it all today, do you recognise that a mistake has been made here, that the decision of the Irish Wheelchair Association and the HSE to close down Cushle and replace it with talk of people going to hotels is a completely retrograde step. As one of the protesters said to me today, who brings 30 people from Keane and Longford every year to Cushle, he said, this is the one time in the year where the wheelchair users feel like they don't have a disability, such is the purpose, designed, built, if you like, nature of the place. So people are appalled at it and they're also a little bit appalled at the attitude of the Irish Wheelchair Association in, for example, not providing transport to get people down to the protest today. And it just begs the question, are, you know, the people making these decisions just out of touch with wheelchair users, that they could make such a mistake? And I'd like you to comment on it, but given that they're outside today, I think what they would love to hear, Taoiseach, is you say, you are going to intervene in this situation and make sure that Cushle is not closed down. Thanks very much, deputies. As deputies will know, cabinet meets every week, sometimes twice a week. Cabinet committees tend to meet quarterly. There are standing items on the agenda, which is usually a review of the implementation of overarching government strategies like Saundra Care or the Climate Action Plan or the Action Plan on Rural Development or Project Ireland 2040 or Global Ireland 2025. And then we'll often bring another issue or one or two other issues that require further scrutiny. So, for example, auto-enrolment or pension reform or big strategies or documents that are coming to Cabinet and it gives us a bit more time to explore them in a bit more detail than we can on a Tuesday morning. The difference, really, I suppose, between a cabinet meeting and a cabinet subcommittee meeting is that relevant ministers of state are present, officials are present too, and advisers, but not everyone. So people are there on the basis of the need to be there and they're preceded by a senior officials group, which tees up, if you like, the agenda and the documents for the meeting. I said they've been working since 2011, so there's been no fundamental change. No, I didn't. I've just reshaped them. But we've been having campus subcommittees every month or every other month for seven or eight years now with SOGs before them. My recollection is wrong. The one on security, for example, allows us to bring in the Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces, allows us to bring in the Guard Commissioner who we couldn't bring into a Cabinet meeting. But there are many different ways of doing business. Cabinet, Cabinet subcommittees and actually meeting ministers and meeting people, not under the umbrella of a Cabinet subcommittee. Sometimes officials in particular favour Cabinet subcommittees because it falls under Cabinet confidentiality, whereas meetings by bilateral ministers actually don't, so sometimes they can actually be more transparent than the Cabinet subcommittees. Obviously government accepts responsibility for all that it achieves and accepts responsibility for all that it does not achieve. And when we don't achieve things, we continue to work on them. In terms of the housing targets, I don't think it's correct to say that none of our housing targets set out in Rebuilding Ireland have been met. I think some of the ones around supply of housing have been met and also on social housing, but I don't have them in front of me, so I don't want to swear to that. Just in terms of the questions on Sláinte care, what I was referring there specifically to is eligibility. Sláinte care sets out an all-party vision for universal healthcare, in which healthcare is provided on the basis of need and not on the ability to pay. However, Sláinte care doesn't say that it would be totally free for everyone. It leaves open the possibility of co-payments, of social insurance payments, of all those things. So it doesn't say free at the point of use, and that's what I was referring to. Sláinte care allows for us to continue to have some forms of charges and co-payments and so on. So free for a lot of people, maybe subsidised for others, but not free for everyone. That's the point I was making. On the butler, that report was brought to Cabinet. That's the report that was done on how we can separate private practice, how we can remove private practice from public hospitals. That is government policy, and that is what is recommended in Sláinte care, and it is our policy to do so. But I really think the butler report is a very good read. I've read it twice, and the documents attached to it, including the impact on health insurance prices, things like that. And it does lay out what can be achieved, but also the limitations too. And roughly about 15% of the work done in public hospitals at the moment is private patients. It's actually been going down quite considerably in recent years. But roughly 15% of the patients seen in our public hospitals now are private patients. And as the butler points out, when we remove private practice from public hospitals, it's not as simple as that freeing up 15% more capacity. What might happen is those private patients might just decide to be public patients. So while it will have a more equal system in our hospitals, removing it doesn't necessarily mean any more patients being seen, or any more operations being done, it just means that there will be more equality in terms of how long people wait for operations and appointments in our hospitals. And that is valuable in itself. But to say that it increases capacity wouldn't be in line with what's said in the report. And the report also outlines the costs, a cost of roughly 600 million a year in lost income to our public hospitals once it's done. So that's 3 billion over 5 years or 6 billion over 10 years. And that lost income would have to be obviously replaced with money from taxpayers. And it also suggests too as well that we would have to negotiate and compensate consultants for changes to their contract and lost income. So all of these things are difficult issues. But we're going to make a start on it. And we had a very good meeting involving Mr. Harris, Mr. Donoghue and I on how we can make a start on it. And we should be in a position to make an announcement on that soon. We're not reprofiling the NDP. We've been promised to reprofile the NDP. What was provided in the summer economic statement was a reprofiling. So you're correct on that. And that provided an extra 200 million, mainly for health and for communications. And then there was a further reprofiling in the budget where some money was moved back and forward again because we didn't need as much in health as we thought. And broadband is delayed and there was movement from transport too. So if that's what you mean by reprofiling, we will do that every six months at budget time and also at the summer economic statement. There are no schools being cancelled or delayed. Are you joking? There aren't. If you want to give an example of a school that's being cancelled, give it to me now. What about the prevention scheme in Denmark? If anybody in the Chamber wants to give an example of a school being cancelled, they can do so. Richard, the time is up. We need to move on to question seven.