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

I outlined the Government's response to this earlier. Perhaps that was before the Deputy came to the Chamber. We are doing a number of things. First, we are increasing the number of beds across the country, including in Clonmel and Limerick. Since 2014, we have been adding more beds to the hospital system. Deputies will recall that when Fianna Fáil and the Green Party were in power during the boom, they took a policy decision to take thousands of beds out of our hospitals. As soon as we had the money to start reversing that, we did so and have been doing so from 2014 onwards.

We are also providing more funding for the fair deal scheme and home help because hundreds of people could be in nursing homes or at home with adequate supports rather than in hospital. We increased funding for those schemes significantly in budget 2020. We also secured an agreement with GPs to increase the scope of the services they provide in the community so that people with chronic diseases such as COPD and diabetes can be better looked after in the community and not need to go into hospital in the first place. Obviously that contract was signed a few months ago and it will be a while before the new services are up and running.

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