David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I wish to come back in later in a second round on mental health, and on elective centres and hospitals but I also will raise a last point now. In his opening statement the Minister referred to 160 net additional acute inpatient beds. The Minister might recall that we had some discussion on this subject matter as part of a priority question I tabled last week. As I understand it the majority of those are still the legacy beds coming from funding in 2020, in terms of the 1,147 beds that were funded and an additional 70 or 80 that year the following year as part of the national service plan. It was a round figure of nearly 1,200. There may have been a bit more here in budgets since but nothing substantial. In any event I was asking about the rapid build beds. The Department of Health and the HSE were in here on this very subject. I asked them very bluntly and very directly if it is about funding and they said "Yes". Interestingly enough they said they had done an awful lot of the work and identified the sites. With the huge amount of the work done they said they could actually deliver these quite rapidly. So, we could deliver them in 2024 if we had the funding. The problem is we do not and the funding is not there. I note that when the Minister was in with the health committee last year we had talked about it as well. There were a couple of newspapers spreads about 1,500 rapid-build beds and there was huge excitement in the system that these beds were going to come because we knew we did need more bed capacity. What happened and where is that at? Do we have the funding to start progressing those 1,500 beds for this year? From memory, in response to a priority question I believe the Minister said to me there were lots of expressions of interest and all of that went very well. That is a positive. The Department is saying that sites are identified, so that is not a problem. Is it simply that we have to provide the capital funding and that it is not there yet?