Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

In a short number of years, there has been an increase of 30,000 staff and many of those people have gone into dedicated sectors.

As to why it takes so long, as Deputy Kenny knows, a lot of the difficulties lie in the fact that it takes a long time from an approval being given by the Department of Health and Children or the HSE and the appointment of a design team to going through the stages of development and undertaking construction. There are procedures in our public capital programme that we have tightened down in recent years because people were always concerned about what abuse might exist. One of the reasons we wanted to move on the issue of campus beds, to get more beds in and make more space, was for that reason, because it would greatly speed up matters.

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