Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Is ceart a rá go bhfuil beagán ábhair níos tábhachtaí nó níos práinní ná an ábhar a táimid ag plé. Ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a chur in iúl don Teachta Louise O'Reilly as ucht an rún seo a chur os comhair na Dála.

Deputy Louise O'Reilly, my party's health spokesperson, deserves commendation on bringing forward again in the House the issue of our health service. In the motion that Deputy O'Reilly has tabled on behalf of our party, she not only analyses the issues that face hundreds of thousands of people but also comes up with the solutions in the form of a nine-point action plan that we are asking the Government to implement.

As on previous occasions, Deputy O'Reilly has shown leadership on this issue in dealing with the crisis in our health service. It was only a number of months ago that the Deputy won popular support for her realistic proposals to deal with the issues of recruitment and retention.

We have heard from previous speakers of the crisis that we are facing with 707,000 people waiting for medical procedures across our public hospitals. No county is immune from that crisis. In my county, the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, tells us that 17,673 patients either require outpatient or day-case treatment in Letterkenny University Hospital. When we break these figures down, we see the pain and suffering that these people have to wait through. A total of 2,319 of them have been on a waiting list for more than a year and a further 2,308 have been waiting for more than 18 months.

At Letterkenny hospital's emergency department, we see more turmoil. We see there were 4,889 patients forced onto trolleys last year, an average of 19 patients every day. Meanwhile, beyond all comprehension, only a number of metres away is a closed ward with 19 beds. A closed ward has been lying empty for the past number of years. The Government refuses to provide the funding to reopen it and to ensure that every patient on a trolley has a bed, which in itself would allow for more capacity within the system to deal with the atrocious waiting lists.

It is easy to focus on statistics but we must be mindful that behind every one of these numbers is a human being. They are our mothers, our fathers, our brothers, our sisters, somebody's son or somebody's daughter. They are people, just like the Minister of State and me. They are sick and vulnerable and they need the State to help them, to care for them and in some instances to save their lives, and yet, month after month, year after year, they are being failed by the Government. Tá siad á ligint síos arís agus arís eile ag an Rialtas They are being failed by a Government whose policies and reluctance to prioritise health more broadly put the health, well-being and lives of patients and their families at risk. That is the reality of the situation.

Yesterday, we heard that despite having €1.4 billion available to invest to deal with this crisis and address this challenge head on, the Government has decided in the summer economic statement that is not the best course of action.

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