Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

There are two separate questions here. Deputy Kenny asked the position of the five hospitals in the region, Cavan, Monaghan, Drogheda, Dundalk and Navan. The immediate money in this year's capital programme and the next few years capital programme, as Professor Drumm pledged at recent meetings, is to provide better standards of service in those hospitals and to ensure they have sufficient expert staff at every level to provide a top class service. He has stated publicly on numerous occasions that in some of those hospitals, services would be taken from them and developed in some of the other hospitals. It is his view that mainstream consolidated services would provide the best service from a health and patient safety point of view, build up critical mass and avoid the kind of issues mentioned in some of the recent reports.

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