The Taoiseach will be aware that the Covid-19 pandemic has had a serious impact on all health services. Oncology services have been very badly hit. There has been a drop in cancer screening, cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment. A red flag has been raised this week by Professor Seamus O'Reilly, who stressed that delays in the identification and treatment of cancer can lead to increased mortality. For every six months that there is a population-wide difficulty regarding diagnosis, it leads to increased mortality over a ten-year period. We must ensure that the investments in budget 2022 are made in cancer care, in the urgent recruitment of more consultant oncologists and in diagnostics and treatment.

I ask the Taoiseach to commit to that in budget 2022.

The budget for health this year has been very expensive and unprecedented. The issue has been to facilitate the safe return of non-Covid services. The focus in the reopening of society on a cautious and phased basis was to prioritise the return of health services. The cyberattack has hit that even more in terms of what it did to the national integrated medical imaging system, NIMIS, diagnostic system and scanning capacity, particularly in radiology. That is coming back in quite a number of hospitals. There is no doubt that we will allocate resources and do everything we possibly can to restore services, particularly cancer screening programmes, oncology services and surgery in general.