James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There were 47 people on trolleys in Galway University hospital yesterday morning. This is utterly unacceptable but we get surges of activity and we take action. Today that number has fallen to 30 and it will fall further as we open more beds in the Merlin Park hospital and take other actions as well.

It is the same in Cork. The system experiences surges in different parts of the country at different times and I have already pointed out that this happens in the North of Ireland and England. We take action to address it. Deputy Kelleher mentioned my raising the figure of 56,000 people waiting for outpatient services. The Government of which he was part never bothered to count the number of people waiting for outpatient services. We were the first Government to do so and tomorrow we will release figures showing a massive improvement in the number of people who have had to wait over one year. It is well over 100,000 people; that is the legacy left by Deputy Kelleher's Government. I am reminded of the words of Bill Clinton when he said that what was really annoying people was that it was taking him so long to clean up their mess.

The bottom line is that there have been 29,200 fewer people on trolleys in the past 12 months since we took over. That is progress and is attributable to the men and women who work in our health service. I want to commend them at every opportunity. Despite the January we have had, the figures are still lower this year than this time last year. No amount of finger-wagging and head-shaking from Deputy Kelleher-----

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