Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Across the State people woke up this morning to the horrific newspaper reports on our health services. An elderly woman, placed in an all-male ward due to overcrowding in South Tipperary General Hospital, was allegedly subjected to a horrific sexual assault. In another report we read of Dualtagh Donnelly, the father of two who, having cut his arm on a glass door, bled to death while waiting for 40 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. This is despite the fact that the family home where he lived was only five minutes from Dundalk ambulance station and close to Louth County Hospital, whose accident and emergency department has been closed. All these stories come on the back of the story we heard yesterday of the 91 year old man who was lying on a trolley for 29 hours in Tallaght Hospital. The Minister said the Government would address these problems but it is five years into its term of office, its last dying months. When is it going to fix the trolley crisis? When will it fix the crisis in our ambulance services? Dualtagh Donnelly may have been able to be on this earth today if an ambulance was there for him at the appropriate time.

These are not isolated instances. This House has heard different stories about delays to ambulances where they have been deployed without paramedics or where people have had to ask neighbours to drive the ambulance. We have heard of ambulances whose wheels have fallen off. The trolley crisis only gets national attention and prominence when it is a 91 year old person or someone aged 100 or more but should it be acceptable, in this day and age in our society, to allow a 50 year old or a 15 year old to spend 29 hours on a hospital trolley? The 91 year old to whom I refer was joined yesterday by over 400 individuals. Is it not time to accept that after five years in office, the Government has failed to deliver on fixing the health crisis? Is it not reasonable to accept that its failure to invest after stripping valuable resources out of our health service is the cause of what we read in our national newspapers today and have read on many other days in the past year?

According to the budget document, the Government has provided €18 million in additional funding for 2016 when demographic pressures and the Lansdowne Road agreement are stripped out, yet it provides multiples of that amount - nearly ten times the amount - in tax reliefs to those who earn over €70,000.

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