Where has the Government gone wrong on dental and orthodontic services? I was here when this was being raised seven years ago. Where has the Government gone wrong? Why has it not learned and why has it not listened? There are 11,000 on waiting lists, most of whom are children. Some 8,000 have been waiting to see a dentist for longer than two years. Where has the Government gone wrong? All my colleagues here have said the very same things. They have said it is absolutely disgusting and a disgrace that people cannot get to see a dentist. Children are supposed to have at least three visits to a dentist before they leave primary school but they do not get to see a dentist at all. How do we fix this? As we told the Government a couple of years ago, fixing it is very simple. You build a team. You try to retain the next generation within the country. You train them and get them into practices where they have regular hours. So many people are waiting for services that the dental surgeries are staying open and people are working longer hours. Dentists coming into these practices do not want to stay there because the hours are too long and they can get better hours in other areas. They may leave the country. We have to build a team and encourage that team to stay here working in practices, even local practices, to help people. The same thing happened with SouthDoc, Shannondoc and our doctors' surgeries. The same thing is happening all the time but the Government is ignoring it. The small practices cannot keep going. You see doctors retiring and nobody taking on their surgeries. The same thing is now happening in dentistry. The Government still has not listened. I have been here listening to this for seven years now. It is the same thing over and over again. We are promised it will be sorted this year, next year or the year after. As this goes on, children and adults are left suffering. I guarantee that if the Minister of State himself had an issue with his teeth, he would not wait. He would go private because he is in a financial position to do so. A lot of people in this country are not in that position. They are watching their children suffer because the Government did not listen and did not build a team to ensure we would have dentistry into the future.

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