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

When there are additional beds, one of the most important things to do is to staff them. We are hiring more staff. Some 700 additional nurses will be hired this year alone, allowing us to open beds that may have been closed temporarily and also to facilitate patients being discharged more quickly, thus allowing beds to be used by more patients and to have faster turnover of beds.

The national bed capacity review is not completed yet and we need to complete it. I do not believe a bed capacity review can be done in isolation. As hospitals have overlapping catchment areas, it needs to be done on a national basis. However, I am told it is very far advanced.

I mentioned earlier that providing new blocks or new hospital wings can take a number of years. For example, a new one has just been opened in Galway, providing 75 more beds. A new emergency department in a new block in Limerick has been opened in recent months. A new emergency department and an acute floor have opened in Kilkenny in recent months. All these things took many years to plan and build. Even if we approved additional hospital blocks now, it would take a number of years to build.

See this speech in context