Senator John McGahon - speech from 19 Jun 2024

A couple of things, I suppose, Minister. There are two or three issues I want to just raise before I get into a wider context of it. The first one is an issue which I raised a year ago in this House, which is in relation to palliative care. Now, this is a result of a HSE decision. The CHO8 area, which you will know yourself, Minister, covers Louth, Meath, Portlaoise and Offaly. And a decision was made by the HSE that in the Louth and Meath areas, only clinical nurse specialists would be able to administer palliative care. In every other health service area, public health nurses are able to administer palliative care. So I'll give you an example of how it's somewhat silly. If I am living on the Louth-Monaghan border, and if I'm in County Louth, I have to have a clinical nurse specialist deliver palliative care. If I'm living two miles across into Monaghan, a public health nurse can do it. Now, what's the difference? Public health nurses, of which we have more, are able to come into our homes, and are able to administer that end-of-life care in somebody's own home. And it's part of the cancer strategy going back a number of years where somebody has the right, if they wish, to die in their own home. But what happens when we have clinical nurse specialists only providing palliative care, people in County Louth and Meath then end up having to go directly to hospital when they're getting close to that end-of-life stage, and they have to receive palliative care in hospitals. And that's just a decision by the HSE in this particular CHO8 area. For example, in Offaly and Port Leash, which are part of CHO8, public health nurses administer palliative care. So it's a clear discrepancy, just based on a postcode lottery of whether you're living in County Louth and Meath or Cavanagh Monaghan. And that's a decision not made by the government, that's a decision made by the HSE. It's something I raised a year ago, and it's something I wrote to the HSE about as well. I haven't had much movement on it, and I would actually, given your track record in health in this House over the last decade and a half, it would be something I'd like to be able to speak to you privately about, Minister, perhaps, and see if we can get some movement on it. The other issue that I wanted to raise was the Leave or Leave campaign, which you, again, will be aware of, which is basically that people who are pregnant, women who are pregnant, have to defer, have to use their maternity leave to undergo treatment. If it was a man in the same situation, they don't have to, and that's because of a discrepancy in the legislation. And it would take a simple amendment to fix that. And that's something that Minister Roger Gorgorman said last October at the Green Party conference, that he would fix and he would change. And I'm not criticizing the Minister whatsoever, but we are now at this stage where that still has not been fixed. I've raised it personally, both within the Fine Gael Parliamentary Party, which you were at, with the Taoiseach Simon Harris, and with the Taoiseach's office directly. And the issue with that is that we clearly want to do it, we clearly want to fix it, but the issue is that we are in the extra time of this government, for want of a better word. We can all acknowledge the political reality. We may be here for X amount of months or X amount shorter, but we're getting close to the end of it. And at this point in time, what the government want to do with the Leave or Leave campaign is amend it and fix it, but they are putting it in with an omnibus of bills. They're putting it in with a whole load of other legislation that isn't really been processed. So what I would say is, can we just please make a simple amendment to the Act from 2015-2016 in question, rather than lobbing that amendment in with a load of other legislation. It's a simple fix, and it's one that I would be very keen to see be progressed before the end of this term in government. And I'll tell you why I believe it's important before the end of this term. It's because there are so many young mothers who have gone through chemotherapy who have not had that time to spend with their newborn babies that other people have, because they're undergoing life-saving treatment. And they will have to start to tell their stories again once a new government comes in, regardless of who is there or political parties or different makers. They will have to start again from scratch to start to tell their stories again, and that's tough for them. So we know what the issue is. We know how to fix it. And I think we should really try and do that as quickly as possible with a simple amendment before the end of this government. And finally, the other couple of issues that I would say is that when, and I have seen it myself in the last year, my mother, who actually just passed away the 16th of July last year, so we're coming up to one year from it, our family have personally experienced the HSE and how wonderful it is, how well it works when you're in the system. And when you're in the system, the system works really, really well. I have seen that firsthand. I have seen how incredible our nurses, our doctors, our staff within the HSE and our cancer services are, particularly in County Loudoun from, they are owed a huge debt of gratitude by families right across this country for how they treat our loved ones with such dignity, such respect, such compassion when people are going through some of the hardest moments of their lives. And I just want to really pay a tribute to our health staff as well. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Thank you.