Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Let us call a spade a spade because doctors and nurses know what the Taoiseach was at. They know he was attacking them. They know he was trying to shift the blame for the lack of capacity and the lack of recruitment and retention policies the Tánaiste's Government has failed to deal with onto the front-line workers. It has not been lost on those nurses and doctors that when the Taoiseach was Minister for Health during the Christmas period of 2014 and the new year of 2015, he was holidaying in Miami at a time when the trolley crisis in this State peaked to record levels. He has some cheek. He should listen to doctors and nurses, and the media reports on "Morning Ireland" this morning. There will be more consultants in the hospital in Cork in January than there will be at any other time during the year because of leave. This is about a blatant deflection of the failure of Government to deal with this issue. The Tánaiste talks about prioritising capacity issues. I am sick to the teeth telling him that there is a 20-bed ward in the hospital in Letterkenny that the management want opened. They made an application a year and a half ago. The HSE wants it open. The Department will not open it. This is no longer a winter problem; it is an all-year-round problem. There were 700 patients on trolleys in March, 600 this month and 525 today. This is an all-year-round crisis. The Government needs to get to grips with it. The Tánaiste should do the decent thing and apologise to those nurses and doctors for the insulting and hurtful comments the Taoiseach and the Minister for Health made and on which he is doubling down here today.

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