Tralee eye unit and family crisis
Danny Healy-Rae raised the closure of Tralee hospital’s ophthalmology unit and the backlog of patients, while Joe Flaherty described a family in crisis over a violent teenager and Patrick Costello renewed his call for public health nurses in Old County Road. The Taoiseach said he would seek responses on the Tralee unit, discuss the family case with the Minister of State, and follow up on the nursing vacancy issue.
Come down to south Tipperary, to Cashel.
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What has this Government of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party got against the people of Kerry? For a number of weeks the ophthalmology unit in Tralee general hospital has been closed. There are over 800 people waiting on different lists to be seen in the eye unit in Tralee. It has been there since the foundation of the State and it is closed down now. We are doing our best to take what we can of the people to the North of Ireland and it is an awful long journey. There are other things that happen to people, when something goes into their eye when they are working, and there is no place for them to go. I am asking when the Government will reopen it.
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All right. We will try to get an answer. We are out of time. We have to go to the next person.
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This has gone on long enough now. It has gone on nearly a month.
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I have to raise the case of a Longford family in the midst of the deepest, darkest crisis at the moment. Over the last number of months their 16-year-old son Jacob has subjected his parents to unrelenting violence. He has wrecked the family home, wrecked the family car and in recent weeks his three siblings have been dispatched to relatives and friends for their own personal safety. I personally saw him attack his father at the weekend. His mother rang CAMHS again on Friday only to be told that this is not a mental health issue but a behavioural issue and there was nothing they could do but refer him back to the children's disability network team. Without question, this young boy needs a period of residential care to assess what is triggering these outbursts and how best to equip the family for dealing with them. I sat in the family home on Saturday morning. I saw that the television was smashed, I saw no photos on the walls, they were smashed, I saw holes in the walls, I saw doors kicked in. As a matter of urgency, Taoiseach, can you direct CAMHS, the HSE and officials to liaise with the family and ensure that young Jacob is referred for residential assessment and care?
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I need to raise again the issue of the lack of public health nurses in Old County Road health centre. I have raised several times before the fact that no developmental checks are being offered to small children and their families. These developmental checks are incredibly important for young children, for babies, for picking up future needs and for supporting young parents.
No developmental checks are happening there. I have raised this numerous times. My questions to the HSE are going unanswered. We need public health nurses in the Old County Road health centre doing developmental checks again as soon as possible.
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Did the Taoiseach need a high-level task force, taking over five months to deliver its report, to tell him that Dublin city centre needed more gardaí? On 9 May of this year, when he said he would commission a task force report, he said it would take 12 weeks and that he would bring back its findings before the summer, with an expectation the budget would be allocated as such. We got a report yesterday with ten decent recommendations, in fairness, but they have all been mentioned before and there is no budget or plan. Essentially, the city was used for a photo opportunity. What is the Taoiseach planning on doing with our report?
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To Deputy Healy-Rae, I will ask the Minister for Health to come back to him in respect of the ophthalmology unit in Tralee and the timeline for its reopening and to get him some details on that.
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You have actually cancelled-----
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I will get the Minister for Health to revert to the Deputy directly on the issue.
I thank Deputy Flaherty for highlighting what sounds like an extraordinarily difficult and traumatic situation for Jacob and his family. I will speak to the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, about that. I know there was some funding in the budget to try to have better joined-up approaches between CDNTs and our mental health services. We will certainly engage with the Deputy on that.
To Deputy Costello, I will talk to the Minister for Health about the need for public health nurses in the Old County Road health centre and the importance of those developmental checks and ask him to revert to the Deputy directly.
I appreciate that Deputy Gannon has been supportive of the task force. It took a little longer than planned, although not a huge amount longer. That was at the insistence of the members, who were independent. The plan now is to have a full implementation plan for the next three years by the middle of December. Who knows who will be in government by then. Certainly, I hope what we have is a blueprint for the future of our city and that we can debate in the weeks ahead how best to fund it and the sequencing with which to advance it. I genuinely believe it can have a really positive impact on our city and, in particular, on O'Connell Street and Dublin 1 and 2.