When one hears about the waste of Government money and about the people all around the State, but particularly the people to whom I listen in Kerry, who cannot access dental services, it makes one even angrier. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been speaking to people about this. One person told me her 19-year-old son has never been seen, another person said their children aged eight and 15 had never been seen while another told me of three children aged 17, 13 and ten who were never called. They speak of a chaotic dental service that is going backwards and that has been neglected and underfunded with no vision. Another person to whom I spoke said, and this is a common theme, their child had never been seen all the way through primary school and they were forced to pay thousands of euro for proper dental treatment. We put down a parliamentary question on it and discovered the number of people in Kerry who are waiting because the medical card system has completely collapsed. In the Killarney and east Kerry area, 600 second class children are waiting to be seen. In Tralee in west Kerry, 912 are waiting to be seen. In sixth class, 466 in the Killarney area and 788 in the Tralee area are waiting to be seen and that is not to mention people in other parts of the county. While the Government is wasting money on one hand, there are children who are literally in agony waiting for dental services. Across the State, we can see that there are 11,000 people on waiting lists. Half of children leave school without ever having received an appointment. In Kerry, the figure is way more than that because there is practically no chance of getting seen by a dentist if you have a medical card. Private dentists will tell you that it is not worth their while and that they actually lose money if they participate in the medical card scheme. This has been going on for years but the Government is sitting on its hands and is doing nothing about it. We need proper investment in public dental services, proper school screening, proper medical card services and a workforce plan for dentistry to get more people into the public service just to meet the needs of children who are going through the system and are not being seen. We also need direct access to hygienists and dental nurses to stop the agony of children across the county.

Sentiment score: -0.23