Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 8 October 2025

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

National Ambulance Service: Discussion

2:00 am

Photo of David CullinaneDavid Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)

I have very limited time and I do not want to go too deep into this. I am just making the point that this is an example of what is being relayed to me. Even in Mr. Healy's own report, he acknowledges that, unfortunately, there are patients waiting two hours or more in some circumstances. These are emergency calls. There needs to be a focus on how we deploy personnel and how that is optimised for best use and better efficiency because that was only one example. There are so many issues I need to get to so I need to move on.

I received a huge number of calls from paramedics. I said to others that there seems to be a toxic culture within the ambulance service for a number of different reasons. Back in March of this year, I know a recording was leaked.

I will turn to Mr. Morton now. A number of NAS officials, some of them very high-ranking HR officials, were recorded discussing manipulating recruitment processes to ensure favoured colleagues got promoted, boasting about providing staffing figures that they knew not to be accurate or they knew to be inaccurate, and lots more. Is there an investigation into that and have there been any findings against any senior HR personnel as a result of that leaked recording?

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