Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Will it take emergency legislation like we had for Covid to wake people up? I will give a good example from my community health organisation, CHO, area in the west. We are serving 800,000 people. If people need cancer treatment, they have to travel from Donegal to Galway. That is the reality. We produced a plan where we are going to create a centre of excellence in Galway, which is my own nearest city. We have not created the centre of excellence but we have been talking about for 25 years. We do not have a cancer hospital with beds available. We probably need to invest in infrastructure in Galway to make it a centre of excellence, between cancer care, emergency department treatment and building, a new paediatric unit and a new maternity unit. We still have hospital beds in the Nightingale wards, with ten or 12 beds and a toilet at the end of the corridor. We have four blocks like that still in place. Maybe I am being depressing, but the radiation unit we built took 16 years from inception to being opened and was a small part of the overall project. We have an elective hospital to build in Galway and another in Cork. I do not know when they will see the light of day.

We talk about these things at a very high level and create policies around them, but people with the shovel or spade to make it happen are missing. What happened during Covid was a great example of our backs being to the wall and us doing something about it. Our backs are to the wall with health and we need to bring in emergency legislation to wipe away all these prices that are there and which spend millions of our money without actually delivering the infrastructure we need. Will the witnesses comment on that?