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

If we take the first three months of this year, according to the HSE we have had the lowest levels of overcrowding in five years. Even taking the nurses' figures, which cannot really be used for year-on-year comparisons because they change the way they count them every year, or at least have changed the way they count them on a few occasions in recent years, their figures show fewer patients on trolleys so far this year compared with last year.

The Deputy's question is what we are going to do about it. We should focus on solutions, not on accusations. Our solutions are threefold, namely, bed capacity, better use of our existing resources and beds, and I will explain what I mean by that a little later, and investment in primary care and community care. The first item is bed capacity and we are increasing the number of beds in our hospitals all the time. There are three new hospitals under construction, new wings in Limerick as the Deputy mentioned-----

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