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

-----any emergency departments. In fact, they say we should further consolidate them because modern emergency care can only be provided properly in a relatively small number of large centres rather than a large number of small centres. The latter might have worked in the past, when medicine was different, but it will not work in the future.

The mid-west and the north east tell different stories. In the mid-west, it is absolutely the case that Limerick experiences very severe overcrowding. I know that people there link it to changes made to the role of Ennis and Nenagh. In the north east, however, the story is very different. Monaghan and Dundalk emergency departments were closed quite some time ago - again, long before my party was in government. However, we see in the hospitals that took over from them, namely Cavan and Drogheda, the lowest levels of overcrowding in a very long time. There are record low levels of overcrowding in some of those hospitals. Therefore it is not as simple as saying reconfiguring causes overcrowding because one sees such a totally different story in the north east than in the mid-west.

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