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

As I was saying to the Minister for Health earlier, the major attribute of this Government seems to be to try to manipulate the debate and cover up the realities of its savage betrayal of election promises and the brutal assault it is waging against ordinary citizens and public services. Nowhere is this more evident than in the health service. The promise was that the Minister for Health, Deputy Reilly, would sort out the vast crisis in the public health service that the Government inherited from Fianna Fáil. We were to get free general practitioner care and universal health cover for everyone.

The simple fact and the reality around what we are actually seeing in the health service is another €660 million worth of cuts from the public health service on top of €3 billion of cuts since 2008; a total of 10,000 staff removed from the public health service, including thousands of nurses; up to 1,700 beds removed from the public system since 2008; ambulance waiting times that are now exceeding safe limits; recurring stories of files being lost in hospitals; the downgrading of accident and emergency wards throughout the country, including in the coming weeks the downgrading of the accident and emergency ward in the hospital in Loughlinstown in my constituency; and a total of 237 people lying on trolleys in accident and emergency wards throughout the country today.

As the Minister of State knows, I busted my shoulder last week playing football. I had to go to the accident and emergency ward in St. James's Hospital because I happened to be in town. When I went there it was like a flipping war zone. When I walked up to the window there was a woman in front of me whose head was bleeding. She asked the woman at reception how long it would be before she could see a doctor and she was told it would be between 11 and 12 hours. Needless to say, her distress was considerable at that point. I walked out because I did not have 12 hours to wait. That is the reality.

Waiting lists for hospitals are so long that hospitals are refusing to give appointments to people because the waiting times are so far out. Now, the heads of four major Dublin hospitals are saying that as a result of the Government's cuts and the cuts inflicted by the last Government patient safety is being seriously compromised in our hospitals. The public health service is an absolute shambles no matter how much the Government tries to cover it up. Last week I said to the Minister of State, Deputy Brian Hayes, that it was strangely appropriate that the figure for cuts this year was €666 million, coincidentally, the mythical number of the beast from the Book of Revelations in the Bible.

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