Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick East, Labour)

This project was announced four years ago, in July 2005, on the basis that it was a fast way of getting 1,000 extra beds into the system. Does the Minister accept that the project has been a failure from that point of view? We are four years on but not a single bed has been provided. Not a single brick has been laid for these co-located hospitals. Will the Minister consider abandoning the project at this stage, as it has not fulfilled its original intention? One of the criteria was that the HSE must be satisfied that all co-location proposals represent better value for money than building, commissioning and operating beds in the traditional way. More than 1,000 public beds are currently closed in Irish hospitals because of cutbacks. Would it not make more sense to provide funding to the public system to open those beds, rather than going through the whole process of building more beds at this particularly difficult economic period? According to what the Minister has just said, it will be 31 December 2013 before we can expect all these beds to be provided despite the fact that four years ago we expected they would all be provided by 2010.

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