General Election Interview: Mary Butler, Fianna Fáil
Minister of State Mary Roche is a Fianna Fáil candidate running in the General Election in Waterford. Photo: Hugh Dooley
Currently the Minister of State at the Department on Health with responsibility for Mental Health and Older People, Mary Butler TD is aiming to go one step further up the ladder of political ambitions and get a senior cabinet position, but for that to happen she needs to clear the first hurdle, getting elected.
She is the sole Fianna Fáil candidate contesting the Waterford electoral constituency after beating Councillor Adam Wyse to the nomination.
There is a common view in the Déise that Waterford has been left behind; Minister Butler does not share that view.
"I absolutely don't. I believe that in the last four years, as a Minister of State in the Department of Health, I have been able to leverage my position as Minister for State, to bring investment into Waterford."
She points to the North Quays project and the €170 million given to the project by the government.
"This is the largest development outside of Dublin ever in the history of the state."
She says Waterford needed to see investment into the county, "We needed to see it - and now we're seeing it - and to see the cranes on the quay is great.
"I also think we have seen it in relation to the establishment of the South East Technological University - we're two years in and these things take quite a while to grow. We've had some really positive news with the College of Pharmacy and the Veterinary College - working in conjunction with Kildalton in south Kilkenny."
It is nearing 20 years since builders broke new ground on SETU's Cork Road campus, at a time when cranes are ever-present on college campuses across the country. Butler responded to that fact by saying, "I accept that we haven't seen that type of infrastructure development in (almost) 20 years, but at the same time, we have seen the development of the SETU Arena during that time."
That project was developed with Waterford Institute of Technology's own money as opposed to funding from the government, however, but the Minister stresses the importance of the government in acquiring the site on which to build the sports facility.
Butler said that coming out of the 2008 recession, the funding was not in place to develop keystone projects such as at SETU, "but I firmly believe that the commitment is there.
"Please God, we will form part of the next government - nobody has a seat won yet, but the commitment is there."
The current government have put developments at SETU in the National Development Plan; "So unless anybody will stand up and say, 'Stop it', it will certainly go ahead," Ms Butler said.
While she had hoped for SETU to receive full university status, she said that at the time TU status was all she was able to get across the line.
"I've spoken to many people that have graduated in the last two years from the Waterford campus and from the Carlow campus, and they all have graduated with a university degree. I think we can talk about the lack of investment in relation to the building element, but we have a university out there of absolute standing. There is a new level-nine program for Child Development and Mental Distress.
"That particular program was available in Trinity, and when it was cut from the Trinity budget SETU Waterford with Colman Noctor jumped in and took it on."
When Minister Butler was first elected to the Dáil in 2016, you could trace a lot of that support back to the promise by her party leader that Fianna Fáil would deliver 24/7 Cardiac Care to University Hospital Waterford. While some progress has been made on the availability of cardiac supports, with UHW currently recruiting staff to achieve a major milestone on 8-to-8 coverage seven days per week, in the eight years since the promise, UHW is still far from delivering full coverage.
"I was able to secure the 18 additional staff this year under the Pay-In-Numbers strategy. Now, the Pay-In-Numbers strategy, which is across the health service, makes it quite difficult [to recruit] because there was an embargo or a moratorium last year [on hiring]."
While Butler says she unlocked the hiring process to enable the increase in cardiac care coverage, she acknowledged that it is "quite difficult to fill" some of the senior roles, which has delayed the process, but that a total of 42 new posts had been secured by the government in relation to cardiac care at UHW.
Butler says it is her "aim to deliver" comprehensive cardiac care, but that she has made "huge progress since I went into the Department of Health.
"In July 2020, I was appointed Minister of State, in May 2021, the construction of the second cath lab commenced - which had been in the Program for Government, and €7 million was spent on that. It's a state-of-the-art building. In February 2022, the hours were extended from 9am to 8am on weekdays. September '23, the second cath lab officially opened. May '24 funding was approved for the recruitment of 18 additional staff."
Against the backdrop of a healthcare system reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic, the Minister of State believes she has achieved a lot for Waterford, with her expectation that 90-95% of heart attack cases will be covered by the extended hours when they open "very, very soon".
"The next step then is getting [coverage] from eight in the night until eight in the morning, and that is how that works all over Ireland. Any place, especially in Dublin or Cork, where they have 24/7 coverage, it happens by on-call teams."
The candidate reiterated that she still promises to deliver comprehensive cardiac coverage and that her "focus is to deliver 24-hour a day cardiac cover for anybody who needs it in the South East."
"It was always something that had to be done incrementally," she said but warned that "services cannot be delivered simply by the stroke of a pen".
"My commitment is that I will not rest if I'm reelected. I will not rest until that 24/7 coverage is in Waterford."
Asked why she doesn't have more to show on mental health for her ministerial tenure, Butler responded: "I actually loved being Minister for Mental Health, I engaged with so many different organizations locally and nationally. I'm very proud of having increased the budget for mental health by 44% in my five budgets," she said.
"When I went in in 2020, the budget for that year was €991 million. It's €1.5 billion for 2025."
She noted the development of additional physical resources in Waterford and the South East, as well as the further development of service centres in the National Development plan.
Waterford is the only major city in Ireland not to have a Jigsaw mental health centre, Butler explained that this was due to a strategy change by the organisation to ensure greater national coverage by prioritising the provision of online supports.
"I have been working really hard in relation to Jigsaw," the Minister of State said, "but sometimes words are cheap."
"Just after Covid they decided that they were going to concentrate more on online supports where they are reaching 100% of the population. They have 73% coverage in the country in relation to physical buildings and they had decided at that stage then that they weren't going to put in place any more physical buildings."
Buter noted, however, that Jigsaw is "one of the highest costs of mental health services in the community" and said the cost profile was significant to the local council to enable the service.
Minister Butler's Fianna Fáil colleague ignited a political fire following comments in the Dáil describing the business plan for the development of Waterford Airport as a 'Pig in a poke'. First reported on by Waterford News & Star, Butler said she was "very disappointed" by the comments. She said that progress on the airport has been "frustratingly slow" but said that voters could trust Waterford to support the development of the airport.
