It seems that there is not any aspect of the health service that is not in crisis. Older people are being sent home with promised care hours and care packages that never materialise. Management is dealing with waiting lists in hospitals. Patients are again being asked to queue on trolleys. Yesterday, Deputy Lowry raised an issue I raised previously about ambulance services. Patients in Tullow and Kilkenny had to wait six hours for an ambulance. When will the Government engage with the management of the HSE and the Department of Health to ensure that all of this stops and that the pressure and stress that front-line workers are under will be relieved by the actions that we take?

I appreciate the issues the Deputy raises. First, there has been an unprecedented resourcing of home care packages. The one major constraint at the moment is securing the necessary number of people to work in home care. That is the only constraint; it is not resources. That is a challenge in terms of making sure that we can get enough workers into the sector from a variety of sources. That work is under way.

There will be engagement specifically with the HSE on ambulance services and on the issues that have been raised by Deputies. We constantly engage with the Minister. We just had a meeting of the Cabinet subcommittee on health in respect of that, because of the enormous pressures on the health service at the moment, not least brought on by Covid, which is having a very significant impact.

The two big hits to the health service in the last 18 months have been Covid and the cybersecurity attack, which have hit front-line services hard and put enormous strain on everybody working in them. We are very conscious of that. The winter initiative will be published this week to try to deal with that.