Earlier this year, the Minister wrote in the HSE national service plan that we were to get rigorous oversight and transparent reporting over HSE funding. This was to be the year of no supplementary budgets, the year when agency spend was going to go down, not up. How is it then that ten months later, the Minister and this Government are about to record the second largest deficit in the history of our health service, …
TDs / Marie Sherlock
Marie Sherlock
Portrait: © Houses of the Oireachtas (Oireachtas (Open Data) PSI Licence) · source file
1,206
questions asked
Oral and written, to government departments
117,003
words spoken in the chamber
Across 307 contributions. Plus 32 contributions from the chair, not counted
378
votes recorded
Each Yes, No or Abstained in a recorded vote
186
topics asked about
Across 20 departments
From the Dáil chamber only: committee meetings are not in this archive.
What they ask about
The subject headings the Oireachtas filed their questions under.
Who they ask
The departments their questions were addressed to.
Month by month
Low months are usually recesses, when the Dáil does not sit. The archive runs to 22 October 2026.
Questions asked 1,206 in all
Dec 2024Oct 2026
Contributions to debates 307 in all
Dec 2024Oct 2026
Show as a table
| Month | Questions | Contributions |
|---|---|---|
| December 2024 | 0 | 0 |
| January 2025 | 11 | 0 |
| February 2025 | 77 | 13 |
| March 2025 | 92 | 19 |
| April 2025 | 72 | 13 |
| May 2025 | 98 | 28 |
| June 2025 | 79 | 18 |
| July 2025 | 44 | 25 |
| August 2025 | 0 | 0 |
| September 2025 | 71 | 6 |
| October 2025 | 61 | 27 |
| November 2025 | 70 | 13 |
| December 2025 | 33 | 22 |
| January 2026 | 120 | 11 |
| February 2026 | 95 | 14 |
| March 2026 | 36 | 15 |
| April 2026 | 72 | 20 |
| May 2026 | 40 | 10 |
| June 2026 | 41 | 9 |
| July 2026 | 18 | 25 |
| August 2026 | 0 | 0 |
| September 2026 | 56 | 3 |
| October 2026 | 20 | 16 |
Debates they spoke in most
Plus 186 contributions in the regular slots, such as Leaders' Questions and Priority Questions. Speech from the chair is not counted.
Asked about similar topics
Worked out by computer from the subject headings of each TD's questions, giving more weight to headings few TDs use. It shows shared subjects, not shared views.
Party, constituency and offices
- constituency Dublin Central 29 November 2024 to now
- party Labour Party 29 November 2024 to now
I think we are in parallel universes here. Directors of hospitals tell me they are being blocked from recruiting their graduate nurses, and the Minister is saying something very different. We need to get the truth. The Minister talks about demographic growth but she has not mentioned once the rising complexity of care within our health system, which is driving the increase in admissions and the issues within our hosp…
As the Minister knows, one in ten women in this country suffers from the condition of lipoedema. It is a chronic progressive condition. As the national lipoedema working group on diagnostics and management does not actually specify surgery as part of that management, women end up having to go abroad. There are huge delays in processing the cross-border directive scheme applications at the moment. The women who are ap…
I welcome all of the families in the Public Gallery. Today should have been a day of celebration because, after many years of fighting for justice for their children and the right care for their children, there would finally have been an inquiry into the wrongs that happened in CHI. Instead, we are here arguing with the Minister about this inquiry and how it is flawed from the get-go. One of the biggest sins in polit…
I thank Deputy Coppinger for bringing forward this Bill. I am really disappointed in the Government's response and that it is not facilitating the passage of the Bill to Committee Stage. The Government is either in favour of the principle of recognising non-binary and intersex persons or it is not. It is a well-established principle in this House that even if there are difficulties with the technical aspects of a par…
89. Deputy Marie Sherlock asked the Minister for Health to set out the gap between her Department's forecast demand and actual demand for emergency department attendances, rapid access cancer clinics and endoscopies in each of the tier 3 escalation areas to date in 2026. [73351/26]
The deficit recorded by the HSE this year is likely to be the second highest on record. We have a fundamental problem in how the Department of Health and the Department of public expenditure and reform budget for the health services. We are continually hearing that recruitment is the problem and, in the Minister's view, that the service is overstaffed, but I believe other factors are at play, in particular the failur…
I asked the Minister a specific question about forecast demand and actual demand. She provided no answer to that. She has given me the difference in activity between last year and this year.
This is the critical and fundamental issue. We have had former and current chairs of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC. saying that the Department is not properly budgeting. I have figures from the HSE stating that the dem…
The Minister has not given me the figures.
Let me be crystal clear. It is not what we are spending; it is how it is being spent. I support all efforts to improve productivity. However, the reality is that the Minister set a target of €633 million for savings last year and €181 million for this year. That has gone up in smoke because of the failure to properly plan and forecast demand. The reality is that the Minister is ignoring the specific question that I p…
I have to say to the Government that if anybody was looking down from space yesterday on this country, they would have asked how in the name of God a country with public finances the envy of Europe, the healthiest public finances across the EU, could have had 300,000 public sector workers out on strike. It really beggared belief that the Government allowed the situation to get to the stage it did. In a country in whi…
The Taoiseach's comments yesterday about public sector workers wanting to go on strike were absolutely disgraceful. My question to the Minister of State is whether Fine Gael associates itself with those comments. We can have all the arguments about what was in or not in the budget but the disrespect and disdain that was shown to public sector workers is absolutely unacceptable. Nobody takes the decision to go on stri…
I very much welcome the statements today to mark World Mental Health Day. I also welcome the budget and, as others have acknowledged, the Minister of State's own deep commitment to her portfolio and to delivering within it. I welcome what has been in the budget in terms of standardising what are some really good initiatives. The biggest issue in mental health is that we have such a patchwork of what exists across the…
Yes, so I am going to finish up very quickly. I was very proud to be a part of the Oireachtas committee on drug use reform in this country. There are 11 specific recommendations that mention mental health. There is a Minister of State with responsibility for drugs but we need the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, to champion and drive a lot of those recommendations because mental illness drives addiction and also pre…
I warmly welcome that we are having these statements today. It is the tail end of National Breastfeeding Week. I warmly welcome all our guests in the Gallery today, including those from La Leche League, Baby Feeding Law Group Ireland and Bainne Beatha. Mary Byrd has been fighting the fight for breastfeeding in this country for many years along with Dr. Liz O'Sullivan and others. I offer a heartfelt welcome to them al…
Thank you, Deputy.
As there are no other speakers, the Dáil now stands adjourned until 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 13 October 2026.
The Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, must have pulled the short straw today. I mean no disrespect to him but I find it very disrespectful to us in opposition that no Cabinet Minister has decided to stay on to listen to our contributions here today.
I have to hand it to the Ministers, Deputies Chambers and Harris. They say all of the right things about the international challenges of our time but the people of our c…
Today I want to focus on health, because we need to have an honest conversation about health. We will have a record deficit of over €1 billion by the end of this year, yet we did not hear a peep about it in the Ministers' contributions. An allocation of €1.6 billion for pay, existing levels of service and demographics is what is being put on offer. We know from the Parliamentary Budget Office, however, that €2.6 bill…
I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak during statements in advance of World Pharmacists Day. It has been said many times in the Chamber that pharmacists play an extraordinary front-line role in terms of that preventative and community care piece. We know there are over 1,900 community pharmacies across this country. In some ways, they are the unsung heroes of our health system. While there is a lot of focus…
Hear, hear.
I must say to the Minister as Minister for foreign affairs it is an appalling situation that on the one hand, Ireland goes into the EU Council of Foreign Ministers to advocate for the cause of Palestinians and yet here at home adopts a mean spirited and hypocritical approach with regard to refusing so many Palestinian students visas. There is a 70% refusal rate this year. It was only 15% last year.
My specific quest…
In accordance with Standing Order 85(2), the division is postponed until the next weekly division time.
I wish to advise the House of the following matters in respect of which notice has been given under Standing Order 39 and the name of the Member in each case:
Deputy George Lawlor - To discuss the funding of men's sheds.
Deputy Paul McAuliffe - To discuss wait times for operations at the National Orthopaedic Hospital Cappagh.
Deputy Pádraig O'Sullivan - To discuss lack of resources and staffing issues at Cork Univ…
My question relates to periodic payment orders, PPOs, specifically a long-standing commitment by the Minister for justice to implement legislation to effectively make periodic payment orders a reality for families across the country. At the moment, they are not. Every year, the State Claims Agency has to settle hundreds of medical negligence cases. A small number of those cases involve families and individuals who ha…