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

I am afraid I cannot comment on those individual cases without knowing all the facts. I do know and understand the enormous inconvenience and suffering that hospital overcrowding causes patients and their families who care for them, and also the stress and pressures it puts on staff. I say that as somebody who spent over a year working in emergency departments in three different hospitals, where we often experienced very high levels of overcrowding. None of us wants to see that persist.

I never like to reduce this to statistics because it is not about statistics, it is about people. The Deputy is right to point out that the number of patients on trolleys today, whether we use the nurses' figures or the HSE figures, is the highest so far this year. It is not higher than it was last year, however, or in the three years before that. It is always possible to pull out record highs and record lows by identifying a particular day of the week or a particular hospital or a particular month.

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