I very much thank Deputy Cullinane and Sinn Féin for bringing forward this very important Bill. I express real disappointment that the Government is opposing this legislation. We have to be honest here. As recently as September, the Secretary General of the Department of Health talked about the Department remaining committed to achieving the Sláintecare targets of ten weeks for outpatient appointments and 12 weeks for inpatient and day-case procedures. We all know, however, that unless someone's feet are held to the fire, it is hardwired into legislation and we have clear legislative targets, this will be a pipe dream within the health service. As was referenced, Sláintecare very clearly set out that there should be legislation, and that there needs to be maximum wait times for both performance targets and accountability with regard to these wait times. The experience of so many across our public healthcare system at the moment is of unacceptably long wait lists. Currently, 625,000 people are on acute hospital outpatient waiting lists and 110,000 are waiting a year or more. While the targets are there, only 30.5% of people are being seen within that ten-week target, which is a deterioration on where things were at last year. Things are actually getting worse rather than better. We then see the Government opposing legislation such as this, which is obviously brought in good faith to try to ensure there is real accountability within the system. I got a letter some days ago from a consultant ophthalmologist in Cork, who talked about a particular patient who will have to wait until 2028 to get her cataract surgery done. This patient is deemed to be semi-urgent, yet she will have to wait well over three and a half years from when she was referred. This ophthalmologist talked about having made protected disclosures and raising concerns to the highest level about the lack of resources, yet little is being done. There is a huge amount of frustration, upset and lack of trust in the public system, which is pushing people into the hands of private health insurance. Nobody should feel they have to have private health insurance in this country. It should be just to get the private room, but instead people feel they have to take it out in order to jump the queue and get faster access because there is that lack of confidence and trust in so many parts of the public system. An important part of the Bill that was referred to in the reporting on the waiting lists is the glaring absence of the NTPF figures because they just relate to acute hospital care. We do not have comprehensive waiting list data with regard to primary care and diagnostics. We all know that in primary care, and we have all asked the parliamentary questions, which we have to ask because it is the only course of action to try to find out the information, just how bad the waiting times are. In recent weeks, we saw that 28,000 children are now on a psychology waiting list. When we asked the question earlier this year, we saw there was a 170% increase in the wait list in three short years. A fundamental problem ultimately is the lack of a periodic publication of the waiting lists in that sector to see whether we are seeing an improvement or, which is of course what is happening, a disimprovement in the children's disability waiting list figures. We have heard from Bernard Gloster that there is now an action plan for physiotherapy, speech and language therapy, SLT, and OT. We very much welcome that. I welcomed it at the committee a few weeks ago but there is a glaring absence with regard to psychology waiting lists. The critical thing here is we do not have systematic data collection on diagnostics in primary care. There is a cost, human and financial, for the failure to have joined-up thinking on the lack of resources in our health system at this point in time. A patient came to me in my constituency in recent weeks. He is a patient at Beaumont who needs to be tested via a Holter device. It is a monitor that effectively detects arrhythmias or heart palpitations. His consultant cannot see him until he has worn that small device to monitor his heart rhythm during the daytime. When we started asking the questions across the various hospitals, we saw that the next available appointment in Beaumont for a Holter monitor is June 2026. In St. James's, the average waiting time is 22 months. It has only ten monitors and 733 patients on the waiting list. In Galway, 600 people are on the waiting list who have been waiting 12 months; some have been waiting four years. Patients have to wear this device before they can see the cardiologist. For urgent patients needing a monitor in CUH, the wait is up to four months. These are patients who are deemed to be urgent. The cost of this monitor is just €2,500. There is much technology, devices and equipment in the health sector that costs hundreds of thousands of euro. This is a very simple, relatively cheap device in the general scheme of things within the health sector. Yet, we are not seeing the investment needed to ensure that the people involved can be properly monitored, get to see their cardiologists and move through the system. There are so many blockages in the system. It is not just about staffing. So much of the conversation in this regard revolves around staffing, and rightly so, and beds. The conversation also needs to be about equipment and devices. We are not talking about CT scanners, MRIs or PET scanners in this instance; we are talking about a device that costs €2,500. In the context of a consultant seeing a patient, however, the latter could be waiting four years before they are monitored. It is a reflection of how broken parts of our health system are that we are not even getting the basics right. Ultimately, we need to make sure that we have a much more comprehensive and systematic attitude towards the collection of data in the health service. That is why the Labour Party is happy to support the Bill. The NTPF is charged with a number of responsibilities, one of which is oversight of waiting lists in hospitals. There is a real issue now about where responsibility lies in terms of monitoring how people are allocated onto the in-service or outsourced service provision. Like Deputy Rice, I am less than 12 months in this brief as my party's spokesperson on health. In the context of all the revelations we have seen this year, one of the things which strikes me is that there is not a clear sense of responsibility as to who takes ownership of the transfer of people from waiting lists to the NTPF. The latter makes certain claims. Hospitals in certain areas have taken responsibility themselves, with varying degrees of consistency. We need to get the right level of transparency when it comes to the NTPF. So much money has been put into the fund. We do not want such reliance on the NTPF, but it has become a necessary evil that we have to outsource because there is no other option following a decade of underinvestment in the health service. A key part of the legislation before us relates to ensuring that there is greater transparency in the context of the NTPF. My party very much supports the Bill.

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