Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

It is time the Government admitted the reality of what is happening in the health service and dispensed with the ridiculous and meaningless slogan of "getting more for less". The evidence everywhere is that as a result of the vicious cuts the Government is imposing on the health service, we are getting considerably less for less. Sick and vulnerable people, including children in Crumlin and Temple Street hospitals, are suffering as a result of the cuts. It is as simple as that. Sick children are waiting on trolleys for hours on end. The most vulnerable members of our society, those who most need to be protected and cared for when they are unwell, are feeling the effects. When there are reductions in ambulance and accident and emergency services, bed closures and reduction in the numbers of health professionals in the system, one is inevitably faced with a disaster descending on the health service. That disaster will only get worse as rising health insurance premia mean that more people will be forced to depend on a public system that is entirely unfit for purpose and being carved up in order to pay off the bankers and bondholders who have ruined the economy of the State and are ruining the European economy.

The Minister's plans to close down local accident and emergency services in hospitals throughout the State are of particular concern. I have a special interest in St. Columcille's Hospital in Loughlinstown where the plan seems to be - the Minister will not confirm it one way or the other - to shut down the 24 hour accident and emergency service at the end of March. As recently as last month, Professor John Nichols, speaking at the Royal College of Surgeons, stated categorically that the distance a patient had to travel in an ambulance to receive treatment was a matter of life and death. If local 24 hour accident and emergency services were shut down, he said, more people would die. I appeal to the Government to end the butchery of local accident and emergency departments at Loughlinstown and elsewhere and to reinstate those such as the service in Roscommon which have been closed. We must stop the cuts in order to save lives. The bankers and the rich should be made to pay for the economic mess, not the sick and the vulnerable.

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