Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator. I will get him the exact figures. Much progress is being made. When Covid arrived, we had 258 critical care beds. This is below the international levels that we would expect Ireland to be at. We all saw the deficit exposed by Covid. We should acknowledge the quite extraordinary response by our critical care teams across the country. I do not want to take up the Senator's time, but a conversation I will never forget is one I had with two critical care nurses. They are seasoned, hardened critical care nurses who have seen it all in critical care and they said they were traumatised by their time in critical care during Covid because of how vicious the disease was in how it attacked patients, made them very ill and sometimes killed them. I will never forget the isolation of those patients, sitting on their own without friends and family, surrounded by people covered head to foot in personal protective equipment. We owe the nurses an enormous debt of gratitude. Part of how we show that is money. It is a matter of money and beds.

We have added 65 beds, which is a 25% improvement. To put that into perspective, the total increase from 2017 to 2019 was 18 beds. Our objective is to go to 352, which is beyond what was called for in the 2018 capacity review. That includes nine beds funded in the 2023 capacity plan too. Phase 2 is essentially a new national strategy saying that we need sufficient mass. Is it five centres?