Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests. I pay tribute to the many front-line health staff who have toiled over the past number of weeks to keep the system in some way functional. What we have seen as a national crisis in the last two or three weeks has been a perpetual crisis in the mid-west, particularly in University Hospital Limerick, UHL.

We have a population in the mid-west that is just shy of 500,000. There was a time when that population base had access to five accident and emergency departments, namely, those at the regional hospital, which is now UHL, Ennis General Hospital, Nenagh General Hospital, St. John's Hospital and Barringtons Hospital. There were five accident and emergency departments.

My dad drove ambulances for many years. My mother was a nurse. They filtered people into these hospitals. People were provided with a level of care. When they were ready, they were discharged and went home. The old ways were sometimes better. The HSE needs to fess up that the decision taken in 2009 to wind back 24-hour accident and emergency access in Ennis General Hospital and downgrade the health system in the mid-west has absolutely come back to haunt it. The Minister at the time, Mary Harney, touted centres of excellence.

We have had a centre of disaster. A centre of death is what we have seen regarding some people on trolleys. A 16-year-old girl lost her life on a trolley in UHL in the days before Christmas.

Does Mr. Mulvany, as helmsman of the HSE, believe a mistake has been made, certainly in the mid-west? He might comment on the national situation as well. I refer to downgrading hospitals to model 2 hospitals and removing 24-hour accident and emergency care to the point that half a million people are all funnelled through a single hospital system. Has that been a failure or mistake, and do we need to reverse the decision by way of hospital upgrading again?