Dr. Peadar Gilligan:

First, I will touch on Deputy Donnelly's points. He referenced that he finds this depressing. Can he imagine how I feel as a consultant in emergency medicine who has been working in the system now for 14 years, and who from the start of my career has been trying to address the overcrowding of emergency departments and who still experiences that on an all-too-frequent basis? What that means is that patients who need to access hospital care in this country are subjected in emergency departments around the country to an average of about 14 hours before they will get into a ward bed. The reason for that is the lack of capital infrastructure, beds and staffing that we have.

To respond to one the Deputy's final points, which was what we can do on a cost neutral basis and what would our number one priority be, our number one priority has to be facilitating our doctors and nurses to provide patient care. We do not have a system currently that is doing that. The reason we do not have it is because we did not have enough beds in the system 14 years ago when I started. We then took beds out of the system and we have not put enough back into the system. As a matter of absolute urgency, we require 1,500 beds now and we need to move more towards the 7,000 end of the capacity assessment done on behalf of the Government with regard to the requirements over the next 15 years or so.