Labour TD and health spokesperson Marie Sherlock has said that the government parties broke their own election promises in last week’s Budget.
Prior to last November’s election, both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael pledged to expand free GP care for children up to 12 years, Fianna Fáil pledged to reduce the drug payment scheme and Fine Gael pledged to abolish prescription charges in their manifestos.
None of those promises made it into this year’s Budget.
Sherlock said that the €1.5 billion rise in current expenditure is not enough to meet Ireland’s healthcare needs, and remarked, “the reality is that we have a health sector that is running to try and stand still.”
“You can say all you want about the record investment into the sector and the need for more productivity, which we support- but we all know and we can see that funding to the health sector is not keeping up with population growth and the rising intensity of demand.”
“The presumption this year seems to be that less than two-thirds of last year’s figure of €1.5bn will be enough. We have been here before with works of fiction pertaining to the health budget, with supplementaries then required. It remains to be seen whether that will be the case next year.”
The Dublin Central TD acknowledged that the government are attempting to push greater productivity across the hospital sector, but those incremental changes are meaningless without additional bed capacity and the adaptation of electronic health records.
Additional beds were announced as part of the Budget measures, but the Labour TD said it was below even what the ERSI called for.
“Last year, we were told we would get 335 acute new beds in 2025, but only 286 will be delivered. Budget 2026 commits to only 172 new acute beds and that is less than half the 453 bed per annum that the ESRI tell us are needed to meet demand by 2040”, she noted.
In September, Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill was quoted as saying that women with endometriosis have been “failed by a lack of understanding of the issue in Ireland”, only for Endometriosis care to go fully unmentioned in the Budget itself, a gap which Sherlock was keen to point out.
Sherlock was critical of the government’s glaring omission of reducing childcare costs, remarking “during the election last year, you couldn’t open the newspaper without seeing government parties in a bidding war for the childcare vote-lower fees, more places- because we all know aware of parents out there telling us they have to delay going back to work because of the lack of available childcare.”
“12 months on, there is barely a peep out of you now. You have reneged on your election promises to parents and to providers, all the while the problems are getting worse, not better.”