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

I am very sorry to hear about that case and I hope it is resolved soon. It is, of course, illegal for me or the Minister for Health to intervene to direct the HSE to do anything when it comes to an individual case, according to the Health Act which the Deputy's party wrote.

The Deputy is correct in saying that we do not have enough bed capacity. That is absolutely true. We used have 12,000 beds in our hospital system. We had 12,000 in 2005. Fianna Fáil and the Green Party in government, for ideological and policy reasons, took 2,000 beds out of our system and brought it down to 10,000. As soon as we had the money, in 2014-2015, my party and the Labour Party reversed that. We are now back up to 11,000 beds. We need 2,000 more.

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