Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Mulvany for his statement. Obviously, we should not be having this meeting. It is a perpetual cycle that we have a constant crisis in our health service, and especially at this time of year. Some of the scenes people must endure and the staff must endure in emergency departments are completely unacceptable. Anybody who looks upon these extremely stressful situations, or finds themselves or their family members in them, discovers that, in a very wealthy country, the health service continually gets it wrong with this section of healthcare. It is important to say the Irish health service in general is a very good system once you get into it and there are some amazingly dedicated people, but this perpetual cycle of a situation where people are left on trolleys for days is not acceptable. We all understand there are tremendous pressures on health services across Europe. There are a number of factors that are unprecedented and we understand that too, but there is a precedent, which is that this keeps happening every year. Why is this? There are obvious factors such as lack of capacity. There is a fault on the part of management with respect to not making provision for this. It happens every single year. Why is that so? What people listening in today will want to know is why this continually happens and what the HSE is putting in place to ensure it does not happen continually.