I thank you, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle, for giving me the opportunity to raise this important matter on the Adjournment and the Minister of State, Deputy Moffatt, for coming in to reply. I find it hard to believe that I am here asking the Government the reason thousands of people in my constituency of Kerry South were without an ambulance service for 11 hours last Friday night. I knew before I heard of this appalling case that the health services in this country were in crisis, but now I know it is even worse than that. Clearly, the health service is on the verge of collapse. The Government is no longer capable of providing even the most basic of services.
Yesterday morning I received a telephone call to my constituency office to inform me that there was no local ambulance service in the greater Kenmare area between 9 p.m. on Friday and 8 a.m. on Saturday. Two staff members always work this 11 hour shift. On Friday night, however, at the last minute one of the staff members in the ambulance had to withdraw due to illness. To my shock and disbelief, the Southern Health Board was unable to provide the money to pay a replacement staff member, although it does not admit this. As a result, the ambulance service had to be shut down for the night at one of the busiest times of the week. This meant that for the entire night last Friday areas like Kenmare, Tuosist, Caherdaniel, Sneem, Loo Bridge, Kilgarvan and Lauragh were without paramedic services. There was a large wedding reception in one Kenmare hotel on Friday night as well as a major conference in another hotel which added to the pressures on the ambulance service on the night. The ambulance service that was available had to be provided from Killarney District Hospital. As I said in the House before, the ambulance service in Killarney, a large town, is already over-stretched and has enough to deal with without having to cope with a huge rural area such as the Kenmare area.
The response of the Southern Health Board to this outrageous situation was a short, terse statement issued at lunch time yesterday. In the statement, which played on words, it claimed that it was unable to find someone to cover for that evening's on-call duty when there was a person available to provide the cover, who had actually started work, but was told to leave. Surely in this day and age the least we can expect is that rural Ireland will be adequately serviced by ambulances, particularly at one of the busiest times of the week.
My constituency office has received a number of calls expressing serious concern about this situation. Many were astonished that this situation was allowed to develop in the backyard of my constituency colleagues, both of whom have claimed that south Kerry has gained hugely in every area of the public service since the last election because of their political influence and largesse. Nothing could be further from the truth, and my constituents know it.
I am calling on the Minister to apologise to my constituents in south Kerry for failing to provide thousands of them in the Kenmare area with paramedic cover last Friday night. I ask him to explain the reason the Southern Health Board claimed it was unable to provide a replacement paramedic for this shift on Friday night when it was quite clear that somebody had volunteered to work the shift, albeit not an on-call staff member, but somebody who was fully qualified and capable of doing the work involved.
This is arguably one of the biggest medical scandals in my constituency in many years and a shocking indictment of the Government and its paltry attempts to formulate a health strategy just as it is about to leave office. Will the Minister explain the reason this shocking event occurred because of the lack of a paltry £200 or so to pay the staff member who volunteered to work on Friday night? Has the health service really been stretched this far and are we now reduced to failing to provide an ambulance service in Kenmare because of the lack of such a small amount of money? Will the Minister give an assurance that this type of incident will never again happen in south Kerry or any part of the country and that the lives of thousands of people will not be put at risk because of the lack of a couple of hundred pounds?
