Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is good. I will raise the issue of unused HSE buildings. I also raised this quite recently with the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly. I know of many facilities throughout the country. I put down a parliamentary question to ascertain what former nursing home accommodation was still available and not being used on various hospital campuses. There is not a huge amount of such accommodation. Much of it has been converted into office facilities, which is very understandable. We cannot just start pulling out offices. The Minister made it very clear, and I have heard this from several Ministers, that there is a desire to somehow try to see if there can be on-campus accommodation for newly qualified doctors and nurses to ease the pressure they are facing in their personal lives as regards the cost of living and being able to live someplace.

I have repeatedly given the example of the Inis Ghile facility just outside Limerick city in the village of Parteen. It a 19-bed facility with every room en suite. It was fully overhauled in 2019. It temporarily opened during the Covid pandemic as a vaccination centre. It has 19 en suite rooms but to transform it to a clinical environment would be a massive undertaking. It would involve months and months of fitting out and would be very costly. However, with a very simple decision, surely someone here could say that on a stop-go basis, for six or 12 months, until we know what we will really use that facility for, let us open it up and make it available for some of the nurses or doctors. It is already kitted out with brand-new kitchens and everything. It has not been lived in since it was all fixed up in 2019. A decision could easily be taken that would be transformative. By taking 19 nurses or young doctors out of whatever rental accommodation they are in, other accommodation would be freed up within that supply chain. I ask the HSE to please look into that.