Healthcare Policy
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-21
============================================================

David Cullinane (SF), Waterford

I welcome some of what the Minister said but the problem is there are not clear deliverables and timeframes in the current Sláintecare action plan. That is something that has to change. I want to see, for example, changes to the medical card and GP card thresholds. There have not really been any substantial changes to medical card eligibility in a long time. The big reform that the health service needs, from an acute hospital perspective, is delivering the elective hospitals. If you really want to deal with waiting lists, then build the four elective hospitals as quickly as possible. I guarantee that that will give us capacity to deal with lots of the planned procedures that need to be done, separating scheduled from unscheduled care.
I am big believer in a seven-day-week health service.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:08+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-21