Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator. I have seen the reports and the clinical advice that said the emergency departments at the time were unsafe. HIQA stated that these were simply not safe to run. That will have been in part due to the scale of the hospitals behind them and the need for multidisciplinary care. Where I believe the mistake was made was not investing the kind of capacity that we are investing and have been investing right through the lifetime of this Government. The changes were made and an enormous additional burden was put on UHL. My belief, rightly or wrongly, is before those changes were made - or maybe at the same time because it was a pressing patient safety issue that had to be responded to - there should have been a very considerable investment in UHL.

In the lifetime of this Government, we will have either added or be halfway through constructing about an additional 300 beds for UHL. That is the size of a model 3 hospital. I believe that should have happened at the same time, ideally before but at a minimum at the same time, as the reconfiguration happened. We are now doing that and will have added a level of capacity that has never been added in the lifetime of this Government.