The deepening crisis in public dentistry requires urgent action from government, according to Social Democrats TD Pádraig Rice.
Deputy Rice, who is the party’s Health spokesperson, said:
“No family should be told that their child will face a decade-long wait for treatment to stop debilitating pain.
“The fact that Tiernan Murphy-Power, a six-year-old with autism, has effectively been abandoned by the state, while he is struggling to eat or sleep from tooth pain, is an indictment of this and previous governments.
“Unfortunately, Tiernan is not alone. In the past five years, there has been a 31 percent reduction in children seen by HSE dentists.
“To give just one example of the impact of this – there are now a staggering 104,000 children on a waiting list for the school screening dental service, out of an eligible 208,000 children.
“Meanwhile, in Cork and Kerry, nearly 5,000 children were on orthodontist waiting lists in September, with over 750 of them waiting more than four years for treatment.
“It’s now been over five years since the national oral health policy, ‘Smile agus Sláinte’, was launched and nothing has improved. If anything, services are getting worse.
“This downgrade is a direct result of successive governments’ failure to reform the public dental system. Dentists are increasingly opting out of the service with the number of HSE dentists haemorrhaging by 23 percent between 2006 and 2022.
“This is a public health crisis. When will the new Health Minister treat it as such and take action?”
February 26th, 2025