Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I could play the game as to which one of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael is worse all day and it is great craic but it does not really resolve anything, let us be fair.

The issue of overcrowding has been a constant for well over a decade now. It did not start eight years ago and people are well aware of this. Only last January, we in Sinn Féin passed a Private Members' motion on this exact issue, including pretty much all of the same solutions. However, as has been the case with this Dáil, votes do not matter and the expressed will of this house is ignored.

The scandal of patients waiting on trolleys was officially declared an emergency by the former Minister for Health, Mary Harney, in the Fianna Fáil Government of the day in 2006 when the trolley count reached 469. Fianna Fáil now claims this has never happened before. Indeed, it has happened and it has continued to happen because the policies of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are virtually indistinguishable. The total of 469 patients on trolleys hardly even surprises us any more and it certainly does not warrant a headline, although it was considered a national emergency at the time.

Fine Gael has had eight years to address the overcrowding crisis but the number of patients on trolleys has got worse year on year. In 2012 the number was 66,308, in 2013 it was 67,863, in 2014 it was 77,091 and in 2015 it was 92,998. Is anyone noticing a pattern? We know that this year the number is already more than 100,000. In 2016 to 2019, inclusive, Fianna Fáil has been in a confidence and supply arrangement with the Fine Gael Government and has agreed and facilitated the Fine Gael budgets which have had a catastrophic impact on our health service. Their cause for celebration in those budgets has been the hiving off of public money for the private health sector through the NTPF. Only two organisations welcome this measure each year. They are Fianna Fáil and the Private Hospitals Association. Make of that what you will.

The Irish Association for Emergency Medicine has calculated that there could be between 300 and 350 excess patient deaths each year due to the trolley crisis and emergency unit overcrowding. We only saw in the past number of weeks the harrowing story of Evelyn Crowley dying on a trolley in Cork University Hospital. In Limerick hospital, which staff describe as an ecosystem of chaos, a 70 year old woman spent 105 hours on a hospital trolley. How has this came about? It is because of a lack of hospital beds throughout the State and a staffing crisis. The cause of the staffing crisis in the health service has it roots in the recruitment moratorium in the health service brought in by the Fianna Fáil Government in 2007, two years before it was introduced in any other Department. Deputies can talk to staff working in the health service or to me and I will tell them about it as I represented health service staff at the time. I can tell them that the moratorium was introduced in 2007 by Fianna Fáil and we have not recovered from it. This staffing crisis has been escalated by the recruitment freeze implemented by Fine Gael. Be it a freeze, a pause or a moratorium, whatever the Minister wants to call it if he is not hiring it is effectively a recruitment embargo.

Pay inequality for new entrant consultants and the failure to unwind FEMPI fully for consultants has crippled the public health system and has caused staff losses, demoralised current staff and has left the health service with around 500 consultant vacancies in various specialties, many in emergency medicine.

We have a lack of beds. Hundreds that closed during the austerity years have not been reopened and cannot be reopened because of a lack of staff. I keep saying this and as long as there is an overcrowding and trolley crisis I will continue to say it. To tackle the trolley crisis we have to address the issues causing it and focus on addressing them through increasing recruitment and retention, reopening closed beds, delivering more step-down facilities, increasing home help hours and having proper investment in primary and community care, including diagnostics.

Fianna Fáil facilitates the Government and the Minister for Health holds his office because Fianna Fáil abstained in a motion of no confidence. Fianna Fáil has the power to change things at any stage and push through progressive policies at budget time and other times but it does not. It can line up to pile in on the Fine Gael Government but it knows its part in this crisis and must acknowledge it.

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