Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I do not have the detailed staff figures for University Hospital Galway. In the Saolta group there has been an increase of 689 staff this year, 38 of whom were assigned to emergency departments.

Many emergency departments are old and out of date and there has been considerable investment in them in recent years. There is a new emergency department in Wexford. The one in Kilkenny has just been completed and will be opened in the next few months. A new emergency department in the Mater Hospital was opened in 2013. Construction is under way on the new emergency department in Limerick. There is an extended emergency department in Tallaght hospital. The emergency department in Clonmel is being upgraded, while an extended department is under construction in Mullingar. The planning application for the national children's hospital new emergency department and satellite centres is before An Bord Pleanála. It is fair to say that in the past five years there has been more investment than ever in new and extended emergency departments. The difficulty is that much of the health infrastructure remains old, some of it is 200 years old. One cannot replace all of it overnight and it will take some time to do so.

It is acknowledged that even if there was no overcrowding in Galway, the emergency department is out of date and needs to be replaced. The intention is to proceed to design and planning stage in 2016 to allow work to proceed in the years to come. Just because it is not specifically mentioned in the six-year capital plan does not mean that it is not going to happen. The capital plan refers to national projects and programmes, not individual wards or departments in hospitals across the country.

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