Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Our health service is under enormous pressure. Health care staff, nurses and doctors are literally at the end of their tether trying to keep things together and patients are suffering. Irrespective of what hospital one visits throughout the country - I was in Drogheda last week - one gets a clear illustration of this. Waiting lists for routine operations are spiralling out of control and have been for some years now. Waiting times are lengthening all the time and targets are being breached. Despite the fact the Government changed the goalposts to make such times and targets more manageable, they are getting worse. The Government undermined the National Treatment Purchase Fund which had been working very effectively to deal with elective surgeries and routine operations before it came into office.

Our emergency departments simply cannot cope. Talking to people in and outside of the hospital in Drogheda where I was last week, this was the No. 1 topic of conversation. Waiting times for minor operations and CT scans are now the worst in Europe and the same is true of waiting times for emergency departments. There are 517 patients on trolleys in emergency departments today and operations are being cancelled in these hospitals as a result. Whether it is the Mater hospital, Beaumont Hospital or Cork University Hospital, they are under enormous pressure.

Most damning of all is that the Taoiseach and the Minister deliberately left the hospitals of this country short of at least €100 million in the health service plan. This is acknowledged by the HSE on page 90 of the 2016 service plan where it states there is a funding shortfall of €100 million. It had been €150 million but some cash management shaved off €50 million on a once-off basis, leaving €100 million of a shortfall. It uses the chilling phrase that one of the options which it can consider includes "aligning activity levels to the funding". That means cuts in capacity in our acute hospitals for 2016. It means fewer operations and more overcrowding in emergency departments, fewer discharges and so on. It is incredible that the Taoiseach and the Minister would have approved of this plan, knowing in advance it has left the hospitals short of €100 million. Why did the Taoiseach deliberately approve this plan knowing that, at a minimum, it leaves our hospitals short of €100 million for 2016?

See this speech in context