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

That is the cruel, cold logic of cutbacks but the reality is that in December of last year 32,000 children were waiting for speech and language assessments, many of them for more than a year, and 16,000 children were waiting for therapy. The INMO says that in hospitals we need one staff member for four patients, whereas currently we have one per eight during the day and one per 12 during the night. We have three times less staff than we need to keep patients safe.

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