While the Deputy's question is quite broad, I know that it is really about access to healthcare which is what we all want. It is a priority for everyone in this Dáil, for me and for this Government. In December, the HSE published its national service plan for 2026, which sets out the services that the HSE will provide with its funding allocation. This builds on progress we have already made this year and in 2025. For example we have seen a 10% reduction nationally in patients on trolleys at 8 a.m. in 2025 versus 2024. That does not even show the real performance of some regions and other regions which are performing less well. That story is much better in some regions again. Twenty-four hour PET breaches, the time spent in an emergency department, are down 16% for all patients and by 15% for patients aged 75 and over compared to 2024. We now have 58% fewer patients waiting over 12 months compared to September 2021. We will continue to reduce waiting times for scheduled and unscheduled care in 2026. We have opened 1,481 new acute inpatient beds since the end of 2020. This year, we will deliver 177 acute and 428 community beds. Those are just as important as acute beds because they provide the opportunity for people to move out of hospital at an earlier stage and have the more suitable care that they need. The first new surgical hub opened in Mount Carmel in 2025. We expected it to deliver 3,000 procedures and it delivered 3,700 procedures. Of course, we are opening five more surgical hubs this year. Crucially, we will roll out the outpatient toolkit. That will be a big subject of discussion this year. We will roll that out across the hospitals in 2026. It is in Naas now and is working really well in Mercy, Tullamore and Kilkenny. That will enable us to increase our outpatient attendances both for new attendances and we will provide more services and clinics at the weekends and in the evenings. We will expand virtual care in hospitals and the community. We are also targeting delivery of over 26.7 million home support hours.

Sentiment score: 0.18

I am very glad to have this timely opportunity to have this discussion with the Deputy. The reason is officials from her region and the three Dublin regions will be in with me on Monday for a whole day to go through some of these issues exactly because we are trying to manage healthcare as a region. There are patients in Cavan who will need to be treated in Beaumont, a specialist centre for neurology, or the Mater, a specialist centre for cardiology. That patient flow is absolutely crucial and so patients are moving out of Beaumont at an appropriate stage so as to enable the specialist care. We have to think of healthcare as a region and that it is just as acceptable for people to move back from Beaumont to Cavan to free up the space for somebody from Cavan to go to Beaumont. Regarding what the Deputy said about the step-down facilities in Monaghan, I would be very glad if she has specific examples that she can give me before Monday because it is precisely those that I will be testing in person with the different regions on Monday in great detail. The better the local examples I have for that the better I can test and push and make sure the efficiency in that flow is there. I would really appreciate the Deputy’s support to me in giving me that local knowledge before Monday.

Sentiment score: 0.55

There might be two slightly different issues there. The HSE app is a patient-focused app in the first instance. People can make appointments and see prescriptions. Its functionality is improving over time to be able to book appointments. It is slightly different from the broader shared care record and electronic health record. The shared care record which we are rolling out this year is the technology to be able to see if patients are moving from Cavan to Beaumont that Beaumont can immediately see all their healthcare needs without files needing to be transferred and all of those delays. It is separate to inter-hospital patient flow. That does happen but the delays are largely around space and capacity. That is why we need to make sure that we are increase our acute and community beds and really utilising fantastic hospitals like Monaghan that have so much capacity, not to do the acute work but to do other very important community-based work – to be able to do infusions and use step-down beds and the really important work it can do working in partnership with Cavan. I want to compliment both hospitals on how much progress they have made this year to serve the people of Cavan and Monaghan.

Sentiment score: 0.34

There has been quite a degree of confusion on this and so it is very useful to set out the circumstances of it. As part of the community pharmacy agreement in 2025, all the parties agreed to introduce improved controls for phased dispensing. That would ensure that patients on high-risk medications such as antipsychotics or opioids are appropriately targeted with support for phased dispensing rather than getting everything in one go. It is important that I clarify the difference between phased dispensing and what has become known as blister packs. The State has supported phased dispensing because it is a crucial patient safety initiative with antipsychotics and opioid drugs. The State has supported phased dispensing for medical card holders since 1996 and will continue to do so; there is no change in relation to that. Community pharmacies receive an additional service fee for that service. The State does not fund and never has funded blister packs. There is no change to that service. There has been no removal of that service because that service did not exist funded by the State. It is important to say from a patient safety perspective that while I, as a non-medic, anecdotally perceive blister packs as a patient safety initiative, the evidence that I am getting both from the pharmaceutical regulator and from the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics is that it is not in fact a patient safety initiative and that health outcomes are not in fact changed by blister packs. However, we regard them as convenient and important particularly for elderly people and that is an important part of the consideration. Internationally the guidance is that blister packs should be a last resort with patients being supported by many other interventions. Nevertheless, I recognise that they are helpful but they have never been funded by the State. As I said before in this House, there are three groups of patients. I might come back to it because I am out of time.

Sentiment score: 0.23

I really have to address the language here first of all. There is no policy to reverse because nothing has changed. The basic facts are that nothing has changed and therefore nothing can be reversed. While the Deputy and I believe that and I totally understand the reasons for that, the science does not support that. The more important thing from the State's perspective is the degree to which this service was being used incorrectly by some, not all, pharmacists for their own financial benefit. That is what this State and this House must have an interest in. There are people who have always paid for blister packs charged by their pharmacy for convenience and for lots of different reasons as set out by the GP. There are those who have been getting blister packs for free from their pharmacy and have never been charged, and the pharmacist is simply doing this to support them in different ways. There are also people who were receiving blister packs free of charge but the pharmacist was incorrectly charging the State under the phased dispensing scheme for something that was not appropriate, not allowed and not legitimate.

Sentiment score: 0.15

I am particularly intrigued to see left-wing parties coming in here and asking me to give money to pharmacists to make good what had been done illegitimately. I would like to use the State's money directly for the benefit of vulnerable people but not to reward those pharmacists to keep things even for them for something that they were doing wrong in the first place.

Sentiment score: -0.05

There are many older people, including people who have contacted the Deputy - I see it on her social media pages the same as everyone else - who have told her that they have been paying for blister packs for years and they have always done so.

Sentiment score: 0.00

This is not a back-and-forth and I am trying to set out the facts on it. I would love to see left-wing parties come in here and defend the interests of the State and defend the interests of the taxpayer. Sometimes I think these roles are reversed. Perhaps for Fine Gael, I should come in and articulate the speaking points of the pharmacy union, but I am trying to articulate the position of the State and to get the best for patient safety, get the best for the taxpayer and make sure that we recognise that we are not rewarding activity that was illegitimate.

Sentiment score: 0.46

I will first concentrate on the wider challenges regarding oral healthcare. There is a significant challenge that continues to affect the delivery of school-based dental programmes. In the period to November 2025, over 138,000 new patients were assessed, including 90,000 under targeted programmes in respect of school and special care programmes, but in many cases screening is delayed, meaning some children do not receive an assessment until they have already entered secondary school, except in emergencies. While the HSE follows up to ensure those children are seen, the situation is simply not good enough. I am not happy with it. The situation stems from long-standing workforce pressures and a totally outdated, episodic model of care that is not aligned with the prevention-focused approach we want. The response to this is multifaceted and requires some short-term interventions and meaningful strategic reform. The HSE is funded to recruit an additional 15 oral health staff this year targeted at service areas experiencing the greatest delays. Good progress is being made in recruitment. We have recruitment campaigns completed for eight of them and three campaigns are currently active. Looking ahead, we need to think about how we use the wider dental workforce. I met with the Irish Dental Hygienists' Association last year. Hygienists are a fantastic group of people. They advocate for more direct access to patients. I believe they can play a much bigger role in preventive and periodontal care. I have instructed my Department to accelerate the necessary consideration of this matter. It must be safe and of course add value for patients. Legislative change will be required and the regulator will need to establish the necessary conditions and supports to make sure that it is done safely. That is an important part of how we use our workforce at the top of their expertise, and use every qualified professional resource. In the medium-to-long-term the national oral health policy sets out a comprehensive vision for strategic reform, including new children's oral health services supported by age-appropriate packages of care. I regularly hear this cannot be achieved due to capacity constraints. The proportion of children that is already being seen in private dental practice and families paying out of their own pockets to do so is not acceptable.

Sentiment score: 0.29

I am in complete agreement that this simply has to improve. While the services are there, looking at the wider workforce generally in relation to dental care, if we separate it out from orthodontics, how we use the workforce has come up a number of times. We train dentists at quite a considerable cost to the State. We do that because we want dentists to be available to do dental work, both in private practice and for the State. We want children to have screening. I do not want to deviate too much but I have been consistently concerned by one issue. This has been acknowledged by the Irish Dental Association and ADI, which is the group training dentists. The issue relates to the number of dentists who are being trained in Irish State-funded facilities and the drift towards cosmetic dentistry, the scale of practice in injectables, Botox and other things being done by dentists. At a two-day conference of the dental association last May, one full day was dedicated to injectables. I want to train dentists to do dentistry on children.

Sentiment score: 0.20

We have made some good progress on the training. The RCSI has opened a new community train-and-treat facility in Sandyford and has just started building one in Connolly Hospital as well. We are making some good progress there. On screening, the seven-year-old child mentioned by Deputy Bennett needed much earlier screening, which could have been provided by a dental hygienist. The actual dental work that might be needed has to be done by a dentist. When we are trying to identify problems at an early age, we need prevention, screening, cleaning and good habits; all of the things the Deputy has talked about. We are not using our workforce well enough at the moment. I want to see the role of dental hygienists amplified. They should be given better opportunities to do programmes in schools and to have more direct access to patients. We have to look at every lever. We will train more dentists but when we do so I would like to see a commitment to public service. We have increased the fees generally for HSE-funded dentistry, by between 40% and 60% in some instances. On average, we have increased them by 40% for doing certain procedures and we still cannot encourage dentists to come, at the scale that we want, into that practice, potentially because of the allure of more lucrative products.

Sentiment score: 0.31

As the Deputy will be aware, the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration has responsibility for coroners’ legislation and policy and is actively engaging with all relevant stakeholders, including my Department and the HSE. Since 2 January 2026, coronial post mortems have been provided by locum consultants recruited by the Department of justice, and the facilities and auxiliary staff of University Hospital Waterford have been provided to support that. The Department of justice has advised my Department that the service will be provided three days per week; that is, Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Historically, the health service has assisted in the provision of coronial post mortem services on a sort of grace-and-favour basis. While consultant pathologists are employed by the HSE, coronial post mortems are carried out independently for the Department of justice. Obviously, that grace-and-favour model is not working. Hospitals are withdrawing from the provision of coronial post mortem examinations for a range of diverse and complex reasons, including a shortage of consultant pathologists willing to undertake that work, and increasing diagnostic workloads for an increasing population. My Department and the HSE will continue to engage constructively with the Department of justice to support a long-term resolution of the issue. All stakeholders remain committed to ensuring the continuity, quality and efficiency of coroner-directed post mortem services.

Sentiment score: 0.43

It is important to separate out the arrangements we are talking about. This arrangement is not for all post mortems; it is for coronial-directed post mortems in instances, as the Deputy correctly identifies, of sudden or unexpected death that require and are directed to have this type of post mortem carried out. That is very much an issue for the Department of justice. Clearly, pathologists are continuing to do the work they have always been doing. Where a family has experienced a sudden tragedy - a sudden bereavement of some kind - and the coroner has directed this form of post mortem, that is obviously the responsibility of the Department of justice. I will speak with my colleague, the Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, and ask him to increase his efforts to try to ensure there are more locum pathologists coming. However, University Hospital Waterford remains there to provide support in that ancillary way for this specific type of post mortem, which is, of course, a subset of all post mortems.

Sentiment score: 0.27

Again, I will direct that to my colleague, the Minister for justice, because coronial post mortems are a different thing. There is a difficulty recruiting pathologists across the country. For example, our friends in Belfast are having real difficulty on the paediatric and perinatal pathology side, which is very distressing for families with the loss of a child or a baby. There is a shortage generally but we have to create a distinction between the justice system and the health system, which continues to do its work. We need pathologists to continue to do their work, both in terms of diagnostics and research and also in terms of something that is separate and ancillary and arises as a consequence of the coronial court process. The latter is very much a matter for the Department of justice. Nobody cares about that when it is their loved one whose funeral is being delayed. In that space of real tragedy, real hurt and real pain, nobody cares who is responsible for it; they just want the issue resolved. I will discuss it with my colleague, the Minister for justice.

Sentiment score: 0.15