Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for their presentations and the work they do on our behalf. The reason we invited the ambulance services here is many of us have been receiving information from paramedics and ambulance workers throughout the country complaining about stress, fatigue, being worn out and constantly required to do overtime or essentially, pardon the pun, constantly firefighting.

We get many stories of situations throughout the country where no ambulances are available; the time between somebody dialling 999 and an ambulance arriving being anything up to two hours and situations where ambulances are parked up because there are no paramedics available to drive them. The weekend before last, in Athlone, there were no paramedics available to drive ambulances and that is just one of many examples we get. Obviously, that concerns us. We all understand there is a challenge in recruiting paramedics and that it is a challenge experienced not just by this country, but every country.

How short staffed are the ambulance services? How long will it take to get the critical numbers up to be able to provide a service where the system of the nearest available ambulance actually works? With the complement of paramedics and so on being so low, surely that system does not work. It can only work when the system is properly resourced. I ask for the witnesses' reflections on their reactions to what paramedics and ambulance workers are telling us the length and breadth of the country.

I will finish my comments by pointing out one thing that SIPTU said to us this morning. I asked SIPTU whether it could point to one particular black spot in the country that we could use as an opportunity to highlight. The answer was that every area, at this stage, is a black spot.