Pádraig Rice

I congratulate the Minister and Minister of State on their new roles. I will begin by flagging a general concern I have. This is the second week in a row we have had general statements on healthcare. Last week we spent two and a half hours on statements on mental health. As a new TD I found it a very frustrating experience. Not a single question posed during the session was addressed in the closin…

It is concerning that children are currently excluded from the draft regulations of home care support services. This is despite the fact that more than 650 children with complex needs are receiving these services. In the case of baby Luke, as highlighted in a report from the Ombudsman for Children today, multiple serious issues with home care services were documented. These include routine cover b…

I find it really hard to listen to the Government's rhetoric on housing. The Minister comes in here and talks about the progress the Government has made but homelessness has hit an all-time high. How is that in any sense progress? Rents and house prices are soaring, and schemes such as the help-to-buy scheme are just driving up house prices. The Government is failing people in this country every s…

Branding the houses as affordable increases the level of hopelessness among young people. They feel the houses are just more out of reach for them. I believe we should rename the Act the Unaffordable Housing Act because unaffordable housing is genuinely what it is delivering. We need a radical reset of housing policy. The answers to this crisis are not found in the failed policies of the past. We…

We learned today that the potential cost of the national children's hospital has soared by €100 million in just a matter of months. It now stands at nearly €2.5 billion, although no one believes this will be the final cost. It is outrageous that after all this time, nobody in this House knows for sure how much this project will ultimately cost or when it will start treating patients. There is a co…

The latest estimate is that it will be at least another year. This is the biggest capital investment in the health service in the history of the State and it has been a botched project.

We need time set aside to have a discussion on this fiasco. We need an update on this from the Minister.

I too congratulate the Minister of State on her reappointment as Minister of State with responsibility for mental health and also her appointment as Government Chief Whip. I will talk about funding, policy and the law. On funding, for far too long mental health services have been the Cinderella of our health services. Decades of underinvestment have left us with understaffed and underresourced se…

Like my colleagues, I thank the Labour Party for this debate. I have spent the past couple of years listening to the debates in this House on housing. As a younger person, I find it really hard to stomach the Government's rhetoric on housing. Rarely does it acknowledge how bad the situation is, with unaffordable rents, soaring house prices and record homelessness. There is a real catastrophe for p…

The chronic shortage of public health nurses needs urgent attention. Not for the first time, developmental checks for those aged under five have been suspended in some parts of the country. These checks are vital to ensure milestones are being met and to identify medical issues and developmental delays. At the moment, the best the HSE can offer to some parents is a QR code to a guidance book. This…

I am delighted to have this opportunity to speak on the new programme for Government. Having read the document from start to finish, it is my firm view that it fails to provide for transformative change. Over the 162 pages, most of the commitments are vague, notional or regurgitated. There are very few new ideas and it is completely devoid of the promised new energy. Instead, what we get is more o…

I congratulate the Ceann Comhairle on her election. As I rise to make my maiden speech in the Dáil, I begin by expressing my heartfelt thanks to the thousands of people in Cork South-Central who voted for me. I am incredibly grateful for their support and I will work hard every day to uphold the trust they have placed in me. On this special occasion, I also thank my family, friends and campaign vo…